To Crush the Moon

Chapter Fifteen in which the plight of a world is examined

“In light of your past service to the nation of Imbria,” says the woman named Danella Mota, “we are prepared to forgive the excesses of your men on the ramparts today.”

They are deep within the city of Timoch, on the hard-pressed world of Lune, where three women—with shadowy Eridanian faces and six-fingered Sirian hands—apparently rule over humanity’s strongest remaining nation-state.

“The Furies are most generous,” Radmer answers, with a bow of the head that is surely calculated for maximum ambiguity. Is he being surly or ironic? Is he partly or wholly sincere? Bruno can’t tell.

A partial answer comes when the second woman, Pine Chadwir, admonishes him, “That term is no longer considered polite, General. We are, as always, the Board of Regents of the Imbrian Nation.”

“Ah, yes. My failing memory is abetted by your grandmother’s sense of humor in these matters, Madam Regent.”

But “Furies” is a good nickname for these three old women, who command a quarter of Lune’s surface from this very room, the Silver Chamber. They are seated on a dais ringed by aides and pages, scribes and whispering advisors, but the room’s three primary lights—halide-filament vacuum bulbs, Bruno thinks—point straight down at them, with a smaller, dimmer bulb casting a cone of yellow around himself and Radmer.

Behind them, the Olders Sidney Lyman and Brian Romset—who were permitted to accompany Radmer as bodyguards—exude an air of angry but fearless distrust. And in counterpoint, a dozen Dolceti guards in canary-yellow uniforms loom quietly in the shadows behind the dais, looking grudgingly respectful but ready for anything. Dead before you hit the ground, villain, their looks seem to say, though if it came to that Bruno could probably take down one or two of them himself before succumbing to any serious injury.

But all things considered, the chamber is exceedingly quiet, and the lighting makes it seem dreamlike as well, and the seated ladies mythic in proportion and demeanor. All they need is a spindle, loom, and scissors to complete the effect. But out of courtesy they speak the Old Tongue—essentially Queendom-standard English—and Radmer, with a different kind of courtesy, does the same. That makes them seem more human, and anyway Bruno is well familiar with the psychological tricks a leadership can employ to enhance its mystique, its air of natural authority. The Queendom was founded on these principles, long before he’d been drafted as its king.

“Do enlighten us, Radmer, with your reason for this accostment,” says the third Fury, whose name Bruno can no longer remember from the introductions. Sprain? Spirulina? Something like that. “It may surprise you to learn we’ve an invasion to repel.”

“The very reason I’m here,” Radmer tells her, “for I watched Nubia fall to the Glimmer King’s armies. I know very well what Imbria faces in the coming weeks.”

“Our guards report you’ve distinguished yourself in clashes against the enemy.”

“Aye, madam, on Aden Bluff and outside your gates, and in Nubia before that.”

“We also had a string of reports out of Highrock. That you supervised the construction of a very large catapult? Using the Tillspar bridge as its lath?”

“That’s so, madam.”

“And this catapult is capable of flinging a hollow canister completely off the planette?”

“Not to escape velocity, madam. The capsule falls back again unless its rockets are fired. But yes. The VLC can also bombard any point on Lune, though its accuracy is measured in kilometers, and its firing time in days. If we knew the location of the Glimmer King’s palace—assuming such a place exists at all—then with a hundred shots we might have a hope of hitting it. But I doubt we’ll be granted the time such an experiment would require.”

“Indeed,” says Pine Chadwir. Then she pauses, looking apologetic, as though her next words will sound insane. “But one of our agents observed you climbing into such a canister, being fired at the heavens and not returning during the three days of his observation. Is there any truth to this?”

“Aye, madam. The Imbrian astronomer Rigby believed there was someone living on Varna.”

“The slowest moon. And also the most distant?”

“Correct, although there was a farther moon in days gone by. And since traffic to Varna ended with the Shattering, any population there was likely to include Olders from the Iridium Days or before. Specifically, Rigby was of the opinion that the group was small—possibly a single individual.”

Understanding blooms in the eyes of the Furies. “This man?” They point at Bruno, studying him closely for the first time.

“I’m called Ako’i,” Bruno tells them. Not a name but a title: Professor.

This prompts some surprise on their parts. “He can speak!” And this is no idle exclamation, for Bruno passed the time on Varna as a kind of sleepwalker, repeating the same few tasks over and over again, day in and day out. Unaware of the passing centuries—unaware of anything, including himself. Beyond his first few weeks on that neutronium island, he can’t remember a single thing until Radmer’s arrival.

Indeed, until a few hours after that, for the sleepwalking did not immediately subside. He had spoken—even held fragmentary conversations—but either his brain’s neocortex had not fully engaged, or else its hippocampus had been sluggish about laying down new memories. “Neurosensory dystropia,” they called it. Or “maroon sickness,” or “zombitis,” which wasn’t even a proper word. In extreme cases it was irreversible.

In declining that final trip from Varna to the chaos of an overpopulated Lune, Bruno had been trying, in a way, to draw an end to his long life. But he hadn’t really understood what awaited him. Now the image makes him shudder: the “indeceased,” wandering like animate ghosts, wearing grooves in the countryside with their feet. According to Radmer, whole villages had been known to succumb, going blankly through the motions of life until their crops eventually failed and they starved.

“I can reason,” he assures the Furies. “Though perhaps not well.”

They study him some more, furrowing and clucking. “Radmer, dear, this is a season of ill omens. The sun has been kicked twice, fair Nubia has fallen, and rather than fleeing, or pledging your sword to our defense, you’ve brought us an old man. Your ways have always been strange—since the world’s very creation, we’re told—but this is truly baffling. What do you seek from us?”

“The sun has been kicked?” Bruno repeats, wondering what such a thing could mean.

“A metaphor for eclipse,” says Radmer. “Murdered Earth transits the sun, which appears to explode and then re-form. Lesser kickings occur when one of the other murdered planets passes in front of something.”

“Ah,” Bruno says, for he has seen that sight himself, long ago. To the Furies he says, “But that’s a matter of clockwork, yes? Not an omen, but a happenstance of whirling bodies.”

“So our ministers inform us,” says the oldest of the Furies, as though it’s a matter of little consequence. “But we face extinction. Nubia has been stripped of metal, and is it coincidence that the metal armies which razed it have since doubled in size? The reports we have from that lost republic are as terrifying as they are sparse. Mass starvation, mass enslavement. In the face of that, everything is an omen.”

“We’re here to help,” Radmer assures her. “This man is possibly the oldest living person, and his knowledge of Queendom technology is unsurpassed, easily dwarfing my own.”

“That’s wonderful,” says Danella Mota, “except that we have no Queendom technology. The city’s last wellstone is buried in the dumps, for we were unable to make it work.”

“If that’s so,” Bruno says to her, “you should exhume it and allow me to make blitterstaves of the material. It isn’t difficult, and it would improve your defensive position enormously. With care, every square meter of rubble can be fashioned into twenty weapons.”

This comment gains him the Furies’ full attention.

“Ah, yes,” says Radmer, though surely the idea is obvious to anyone who has been both an architect and a general. And a matter programmer.

“Don’t patronize me,” Bruno tells him. Then, to the Furies: “How much intact material can you salvage? The deconstruction needs to have been performed in particular ways, to avoid damage to the nanofiber weave that produces the pseudoatoms.”

That goes a bit over their heads, but they are persuaded nevertheless, and in short order a courier is sent out to order an immediate excavation of the city dumps.

“So,” says Pine Chadwir to Radmer, with half an eye on Bruno, “this ancient vessel still holds a bit of wine. You have our thanks, General. Does he do anything else?”

Radmer forms an embarrassed half smile. “Actually, I had something quite different in mind, and with your permission I’ll soon remove this man from Timoch altogether.”

“Yes?” says the eldest Fury skeptically. “Our would-be savior? And where exactly would you bring him?”

“The Stormlands,” Radmer says. And everyone in the room seems to gasp in surprise, then slowly nod in agreement.

Soon they’re in a different room whose decorations consist mainly of dead robots crucified on the walls. The human beings—and the Olders—are all standing around a table whose surface is a map of the country. It’s rather misleading, Bruno thinks, because Imbria covers almost half of the northern hemisphere, and stretching it out flat produces eerie distortions in the squozen moon’s once-familiar features. Fortunately, a large globe hangs above the table for reference, and another one sits on the floor behind it in a two-axis mechanical spin platform that would have been perfectly at home in the Old Girona of Bruno’s youth.

The table is dotted with chessmen—mirror-shiny for the Glimmer King’s armies, blue for Imbria’s, and red for the tattered, fleeing remnants of the armies of Nubia. The planette’s Olders are apparently too few and scattered to merit chessmen of their own, but if they ever find their way to this table, Bruno has no doubt they will be some weary shade of gray.

Anyway, at a glance he can see just how badly the war is going; two southern cities—labeled Renold and Bolo—are staring already into the faceless faces of the approaching enemy, and if the robots march by night as well as by day (and why wouldn’t they?), the sites will be under siege by midnight, and likely demolished before sunrise, just over sixty hours from now. These sunset rays slanting through the slatted windows might be the last daylight the two cities will ever see.

Meanwhile, a third branch of the robot army is streaming northward between the two, aiming for the city of Tosen and, one hundred fifty kilometers beyond it, the capital city of Timoch itself. The Imbrian Sea—a bit larger than in Bruno’s day—fills a basin just west of Timoch, stretching northward to the Mairan Shelf and west to the Stark Hills in a rough triangle three hundred kilometers on a side, covering the middle third between the planette’s equator and the north pole.

And chillingly, there are at least a dozen smaller silver chessmen—the Glimmer King’s scouting patrols—scattered all the way from Imbria’s border to the southern shore of its sea. The only saving grace—the only thing that keeps it from looking like certain doom—is the fact that the bulk of the robot army is still in Nubia, in Lune’s southern hemisphere, and does not appear on this map at all. But even Bruno can sense the mass of them down there, implicit in the northward-streaming formations.

“How accurate are these unit positions?” he murmurs to Radmer.

“Very. Cover the nation in hundred-kilometer circles and you’ll find a watch tower on the highest points of each, with dozens more running through the passes and lowlands in-between. During daylight hours, everything that moves is tracked with great precision.”

“How do the towers communicate?”

“Semaphore,” Radmer says, as though this should be obvious. “It’s a quaternary code loosely based on DNA sequences. With properly trained crews, their data rates approach two digits per second, including parity and checksum bits on every tenth flag. It can even send pictures.”

“Hmm.” Not a stupid way to handle things, though a lot of skill and muscle would be required. Something similar had been tried in Bruno’s native Catalonia, before the Sabadell-Andorra earthquake had ended that nation-state’s flirtation with things medieval. But he seems to recall that effort being abandoned in favor of an Old Modern maser network.

And it’s interesting, he thinks, that Imbria has electricity but no sign of lasers or computers. No telegraphs, no wireless. Its leaders, advised at least occasionally by real astronomers, have a rough understanding of the heavens they cannot touch. And they know what wellstone is, though they lack the equipment to produce it or the technical skill to program it.

Clearly they’re not a stupid people. Bruno surprises himself with a sudden ache of sympathy for them, caught as they are in some bizarre remnant of Queendom-era intrigue which they surely can’t understand. Not because they’re incapable, but because no one has bothered to explain it to them.

“Someone has revived an old fax machine,” he announces to the room, when a lull in the conversation permits. The Imbrians fall quiet at that, and suddenly all eyes are on him. Obligingly, he steps over to a crucified robot—one of a dozen mounted around the room’s circumference. He points to the shattered iron box on the side of its head. “As you might guess, this annex, this junction box for external wiring, is not a part of the original design. It’s been soldered on—here and here—using aluminum, which adheres well to both silicon and impervium. And while the skin may look flawless it isn’t really. It’s been scratched and filled, you see? Even impervium, eleven times harder than diamond, will flake and abrade with sufficient mistreatment. There’s a thin layer of resin in every small groove; this hull has been expertly polished.”

He moves to another robot. God, they look so familiar. So harmless! “But see here? The same welds. The same scratches. These robots are of Queendom design, crudely modified but otherwise well cared for. And they’re all identical. The fax machine has a buffer, you see—a kind of memory of its last few operations. Someone found the fax with its libraries scrambled, but the image of a robot stored intact in its buffers. A household robot, ordinarily harmless. And this Glimmer King—surely an Older of great technical skill—cut it open and jumpered its wiring. This is no small feat, for the Asimov protocols are buried deep in the wellstone itself, and are designed to reconfigure around any casual tampering. But he accomplished the task, and put the robot back together, and fed it into the fax again, to be duplicated and reduplicated.

“But as you’ve surmised, he needs metal. Gold and aluminum are best, but almost any conductor will do—wellstone is anywhere from twelve to twenty percent metal by volume. The rest is all silicon and oxygen, easily obtained from even the most sterile of soils. He has a small quarry nearby, you can bet on that. But not a mine, not a refining operation. Why bother, when he can loot the hard-won fruits of civilization instead?”

“Why?” someone demands. “Why would he do such a thing?”

“To conquer the world,” Bruno answers simply. “To smash it and remake it according to some blueprint of his own. The lives of his victims are incidental; he’s chasing some mirage of imagined ‘greatness.’”

“Blueprint?” someone else asks, in thickly accented tones.

“Sorry, a… a map. A design. An image of how things will appear when he’s finished. The intermediate stages are nothing to him; your suffering is meaningless. He’s got his eyes on the future, not the present.”

“You sound as though you know him,” Pine Chadwir says, not quite accusingly.

“I know his type,” Bruno answers. “Given the constraints on your life span and population size, such individuals may be rare on Lune. But they used to crop up with fair regularity. When exactly did these troubles begin?”

“It’s difficult to say with any certainty,” Radmer answers, jumping ahead of the Furies and their attendants in a way Bruno would have found rude. He walks to one of the globes, spins it ass-up, and points his finger at a region marked in orange, which includes the south pole and over half the former Farside. “Here, in the high desert hills of Astaroth, there have been robot sightings for fifteen, maybe twenty years. They were dismissed until two years ago, when it became clear that Astaroth had ceased to exist as an organized nation.

“This may sound odd, but the actual date of its collapse is unknown. Astaroth had always been a sparsely populated country, with internal squabbles and few diplomatic ties to the rest of Lune. Most of its people just disappeared, quietly, and by the time refugees started finding their way to Nubia, why, the Nubians’ days were already numbered.”

Bruno nodded, processing that. “And where does the name Glimmer King come from? These refugees?”

“According to them, it comes from the robots themselves. I’ve never encountered the story in anything but fragments. He has… other names as well.”

Bruno looks him in the eye and nods very slightly, acknowledging that. There have been rumors, yes.

“Robots have been known to speak,” says Danella Mota. “They addressed the Senatoria Plurum in City Campanas, for example, shortly before sacking it and killing the people inside. Only a few escaped with their lives, so I can’t help wondering what the robots said, or why they bothered. It seems capricious, especially for machines.”

“Only because you don’t see the plans that drive them,” Bruno tells her. “But these can be deduced through careful study, and usually are. No one has ever conquered the whole human race—not without a majority vote in favor.”

“You have an air of comfortable authority about you,” says the eldest Fury to Bruno. “Mr… Ako’i, is it? So does General Radmer, but he defers to you, not the other way round.”

“I was once a teacher,” Bruno answers. Which is certainly the truth, if not the whole.

“Hmm,” she says, unconvinced. “I suppose this ‘fax machine’ is like a mirror? Its reflections are made solid somehow, but the device itself can be smashed?”

“Certainly.”

“And this is your plan? To find it and break it?”

Here Bruno comes up short, because no plan has been explained to him in anything but the vaguest terms. The “Stormlands” are visible on the map as a gray oval smear, perhaps eighty kilometers wide and a hundred and eighty tall, near Imbria’s uninhabited southeast corner. The province is marked with the name “Shanru.” But no such place had existed in his day. A land of permanent storm? Why would he go there? What would he accomplish?

His ignorance seems to disappoint the eldest Fury. To Radmer she says, “Will you elaborate on your plans, General? You can risk your neck in the Stormlands without our blessing. You’re here because you need something.”

To this Pine Chadwir adds, “If you can fling yourself all the way to Varna, then surely you can fling yourself directly into the Stormlands’ eye. Assuming it has one.”

“It does, Madam Regent,” Radmer says. “I’ve seen it myself, from high above the world. A fifteen-kilometer hole in the clouds. Its western edge, against the Blood Mountains, is piled high with sand dunes, but near the center I saw a crisscross of straight, dark lines.”

“Manassa?” asks the eldest Fury, her eyes glittering in the sunset.

“The fabled city itself,” Radmer agrees, “exactly as Zaleis the Wanderer claimed. He really did make it in and out.”

“And so you believe his other claims,” says Danella Mota, “his ‘Dragon of Shanru’ and his ‘engines and objects of great antiquity and wholly mysterious purpose.’”

“There were no dragons in this world when it was new, madam. Whether any have been created since then I couldn’t say. But aye, the rest of it I believe. And this man, who calls himself Ako’i, is better qualified than any living person to bring these engines and objects back to life. The Glimmer King’s robots are not invincible, just strong and numerous. With proper equipment on the human side, it should be possible to defeat them.”

“Possible,” says the eldest Fury with a slow nod. “Well, that’s something. But what do you need from us?”

“Transportation,” says Radmer. “Armed escort. A safe-conduct passport which your turnpike guards will accept. The enemy will have taken my capsule by now, and even if I had a spare, landing inside the eye of a storm would be risky indeed. Hiking in on foot, as Zaleis did, is more likely to succeed. I’ve studied his path, which appears to be the best compromise between weather and terrain. I believe we can duplicate it.”

“We cannot spare troops, Radmer,” says Danella Mota warily.

“I need only a few. A dozen Dolceti, perhaps.”

The room explodes at that remark. “Dolceti! A dozen! This Older is as mad as all the rest.”

“Your request is denied,” says a harried-sounding Pine Chadwir. “You ask the one thing we cannot possibly grant, in this hour of greatest need.”

“Then I’ll take my leave,” says Radmer, “and return to the veils of Echo Valley to await this world’s destruction. I would stand and die with you, madam, if I thought it would do any good. But if civilization must die again, I prefer to be among friends.”

Now the room falls silent, and fearful, and all eyes are on the Furies, wondering what they’ll say next. It’s the eldest who speaks first, and her tone is wistful and quiet. “They say you built the world, Radmer, as a carpenter might build a house.”

“The world was here long before me, madam. All I did was remodel it.”

“So. Not quite a god, then. But something powerful nonetheless. And still afraid! You’ve traveled far on our behalf—to Varna and back.”

And here Bruno catches a glimpse of the young Conrad Mursk in the weathered features of Radmer. “I’ve traveled much farther than that, Madam Regent. To the stars themselves, where this sunlight won’t arrive for years.”

“You’re very old,” she says, considering that. “And wise, and strange. And very kind—or foolish—to offer this peculiar assistance to us, who barely know you. Whether it help or not, it surely cannot make things any worse. I give you twenty Dolceti, General, and the blessing of the Board of Regents.”

Chapter Sixteen in which a fateful journey is undertaken

“One of the diamond pillars buckled,” Radmer is telling Bruno, “and the neutronium plate above it slipped almost to the center of Lune. The plates are flat hexagons, right? But at the surface, the region of depressed gravity is more nearly circular. And with mountain ranges on either side, you can’t even really see that. It ends up being more of an oval.”

“A permanent low-pressure system,” Bruno muses. “A permanent thunderstorm.”

“More nearly a hurricane. It brings no joy to the region, no refreshment. Only a hard cleansing. And when it happened, when the pillar buckled and the plate fell and the ground above it cracked and sank, the shock waves struck every fault and fissure in the whole damned planette, releasing gigatons of stored energy.”

“This was the ‘Shattering,’ that looms so large in these people’s history?” Bruno asks.

Radmer confirms it. “Half the population died in the first few hours, and within a week no two bricks were left standing, anywhere in the world. Lune was the jewel of post-Queendom civilization, and without it things just… fell apart. Again. No more rockets, no heavy industry of any kind. It’s only in the past two centuries that there’s been any real consolidation. And frankly I’d still call this a borderline dark age, even without the war.”

Bruno weighs this against his conscience, probing for the guilt he ought to feel. Surely this Shattering is another calamity he could have prevented. But as the two of them step through an archway and into a large courtyard of grass and concrete and grimly drilling soldiers, he glances up at the sky. The sun has finally gone down, but the clouds are aflame, dwarfing the works of Man beneath them. And he finds he can no longer be angry with himself for honest mistakes, or for living through to this moment.

Still, more from a sense of duty than anything else he says, “You and I have a lot of bodies at our feet.”

“Aye, well. At least there is a Lune. We can take credit for that.”

“There’d still be an Earth, if not for the Nescog. If not for me, personally.”

But Radmer just shrugs. “Something would have killed it, sooner or later. It’s the way of things. The important question is whether it was good while it lasted.”

Bruno, though horrified, can’t help but chuckle at that. “You’ve become a deathist, lad. Who’d’ve thought?”

“Aye,” says Radmer, cracking a feeble grin of his own. “A vegetarian, too, for in this life the meat comes from creatures. They have faint little hopes and dreams of their own, and I’ve made war on them long enough. Why should some chicken lose everything, to add another day to this?” He waves contemptuously at his own flesh.

“Would you hasten your own story’s end?” Bruno probes. Among men as old as they, it isn’t a rude question at all. “Is that why you became a soldier?”

But Radmer dismisses that notion just as contemptuously. “I’ve always been a soldier, a fighter, intolerant of oppression. I fought you, once.”

“So you did,” Bruno muses, remembering back to those days, when Conrad Mursk and Bascal Edward had been inseparable, and the problems of the world could be dismissed as mere childishness. It doesn’t seem so long ago, really, and there’s a sentiment the deathists would have an opinion about. Did the long years of his life count for so little? “Still, here we are. Side by side for a new war.”

Radmer grunts. “I gave that up, too—soldiering. Really! With a fax-filtered body and three thousand years of dirty tricks, it was like shooting babies. Not a risk to myself at all. It was nothing a moral person could condone.”

“But you’ll fight robots,” Bruno said.

“Aye, one last time. In my next life I’ll be a farmer, bringing sustenance into the world.”

Now there’s an interesting thought. What will the resurrected Bruno do, if it turns out there’s a future for him to do it in? Teach? Open a bistro, as his father had done long ago, in a land not so terribly different from this one? The idea seems bizarre, alien, tragically comic. But not impossible.

Any further rumination on the subject, though, is extinguished by the arrival of Bordi, the Dolceti Primus and Captain of the Timoch Guard.

“Where are your men?” he asks crisply, in the Old Tongue.

“Departed,” says Radmer. “Returned to protect their own homes and families.”

Well, yes, thinks Bruno, but not as easily as that. At the last, Sidney Lyman had resisted. “So, what, you’re going to help the humans, be a hero, and we’re dismissed?”

“You didn’t even want to be here,” Radmer told him. “I dragged you.”

“Come with us,” Lyman said urgently. “Or let us come with you. There’s too few of us in the world, sir, to be scattering to the winds like this. We’ve got to hang together.”

“I agree. Which is why you’re needed back at Echo Valley.”

There’d been more to it than that, but eventually Lyman and his followers had given up, realizing that their old commander simply wouldn’t be responsible for them any longer, would not allow them into harm’s way on his account. On the one hand it was a sorry way to repay their loyalty—with the barbed kindness of condescension. On the other hand, it was exactly what Bruno would have done in his place. If the world be doomed, well, let them salvage what they could. That’s an order, soldier.

There are so many people he misses, people he loves but will never see again. If he could reach back and save even one of them—not just Tamra, but anyone—he’d do it in a heartbeat, whatever the cost. But here there are no such decisions for him to make. Here he’s a relic, nothing more, and that’s all right. He’ll do his bit—or try, anyway—and fade back into the mists.

“It’s just the two of you?” Bordi asks.

“Right,” says Radmer. “And if it’s all the same to you, I’ll delegate all the logistics. Just get us to the Stormlands and back, before this city falls.”

“Already working on it, General. Your timing is good; with the sun setting, the upslope winds will begin blowing in a few hours. Eastward, against the mountains. That will buy us a hundred kilometers right there. I’d advise you both to get some sleep beforehand.”

“Why?” asks Radmer. “How are we traveling?”

“On the back of a flau,” Bordi answers, in hard and mirthful tones.

This turns out to be a living creature, mostly hollow and filled with hydrogen. With the proportions of a Tongan royal pleasure yacht, the thing has a broad, flat back some fifteen meters wide and forty-five long, with a bulbous, vaguely ship-shaped body underneath. At the front, its mouth is surprisingly tiny, and surrounded by eyes and nostrils of alien design.

“It looks like a leviathan,” Bruno says, referring to the largest of the multicellular creatures in the ocean of Pup, the marginally habitable world circling Wolf 359. The thought brings a pang to his heart, for the King of Wolf had been Edward Bascal Faxborn, an alternate version of Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. King Eddie to his admirers, he’d been by all accounts a fair-minded ruler who had taken more closely after Bruno and especially Tamra.

And though he’d thought his grief long exhausted, Bruno finds that the thought of Tamra Lutui can still wrench his insides. Not just the coolly smiling Queen of Sol—though he misses her, too—but the twenty-year-old girl who’d gigglingly granted him the title of declarant in a room full of well-dressed strangers. And then philander, yes, a few months later—in her royal bedchamber, attended only by those dainty robots that looked more like ballerinas than like the later Palace Guards.

“It was a leviathan once,” Radmer says, yanking Bruno back to the present. “But now it swims a sea of air.”

And that’s absurd, because the Wolfans had never managed a starship to return even their own miserable selves to Sol, much less a mindless, overgrown alien invertebrate. He says, “Was the genome transmitted over the Instelnet? Part of the intellectual property traffic?”

“It was, yes, during the late Queendom era. Eridani bought it from Wolf, and carried it here in their armadas’ libraries. And since the four known life-bearing worlds were all seeded by the same primordial source, deep in the galaxy somewhere, it wasn’t hard to insert that genome into a Terran yeast cell and convince it to grow. If you recall, the early Lunites were quite talented bioengineers.”

“I don’t recall it, no,” says Bruno. “I was quite busy at that time, trying to save a bit of Earth. All in vain, as it turned out, but it was important to try.”

Radmer muses for a moment before adding, “Those engineers had all the best equipment from the old Queendom, and all the best techniques from half a dozen colonies. And there was no law to stop them, not really. From the original genomes, of course, they began their customizations; the flau was only one project of hundreds.”

The creature is ugly in the extreme, its lumpy, rubbery skin gleaming in the rainbow light of Murdered Earth. It doesn’t seem to have much shape, either, though that might be more a function of its lying on the hard, flat pavement of the Timoch International Airport. In the water, with its fans and frills extended, the leviathan had always moved with the same slow, eerie beauty of sea creatures everywhere.

Heck, it probably still drifts in the seas of Pup, dreamily unaware of the solid little beings that came and went in the caverns of its world’s rocky highlands. Unlike the Eridanians, the Wolfans could at least go outside, if not exactly live there. They could explore their ocean, could sting its residents with probes and biopsy needles. A few humans had even been eaten by leviathans, and at least one man had been rescued alive, days later, after cutting through to an air sac and subsisting on the moisture of its walls. It was huge interstellar news at the time. But even that had scarcely seemed to register with the affected creature, which swam peacefully away in unhurried search of more cooperative meals.

Here, the “flau” has had metal rings driven through its body, with hemp and leather ropes strung through them, making it a kind of artifact, a ship, an old-fashioned beast of burden. A thing both owned and controlled, no longer free.

“This is how people travel?” he asks disapprovingly.

“When necessary,” Radmer allows. “Though smaller groups would generally use a cloth balloon, and single individuals can still travel by glider. If they begin at sufficient altitude and ride the thermals skillfully, glider pilots have been known to circumnavigate the world.”

This surprises Bruno only slightly, because the world is small, and the mountains of Lune tower much higher over its seas than the hills of Earth ever did, giving rise sometimes to very strong updrafts. Still, this place evokes a sort of continuous amazement in him, for what appears rustic—even primitive—at first glance, always turns out to be something more. Something clever, something optimized for the environment and the available resources. The absence of wellstone—indeed, of semiconductors in general—has pushed the Lunites to almost uncanny extremes of artistry and invention. And that makes it not so terribly different from the Queendom, which after all had hired an inventor as its king.

“Why not simply use a blimp?” he asks.

And Radmer counters, “Why not stay home? The flau can be a bit tricky—people have been known to fall off when they get the hiccups—but they know their own way. They’re self-healing and self-balancing, and they almost never get hit by lightning. They just… go around the storms.”

“General,” says Bordi, striding toward them in the darkness. “The wind is shifting, so we’d best get aloft while we can. You two can lash your bags at the stern. Mind the steersman, though; put them exactly where he specifies, and no other place.”

“Aye,” Radmer acknowledges. “Thank you, Captain.”

Two other people follow in Bordi’s wake, and after a moment Bruno recognizes them as Natan and Zuq, the Dolceti who stood with him at the city gate, while the others ran off to battle.

“Good evening,” he says to them, without any particular emphasis. And their reply, though less than enthusiastic, contains a good bit more deference than their earlier speech had. “It’s Encyclopedia Man. Hello, sir. Apparently we’re at your service.”

“Not by choice, surely,” he says, and they surprise him by denying it. “Now, now. Any ward of the Regents is a ward of the Order of Dolcet, and deserving the best protection. We volunteered and were accepted.”

“Well,” Bruno says, feeling a bit of human warmth stirring in the ancient hollows of his heart. “You have my gratitude, then.”

“Up you go,” says Zuq, grabbing a rope ladder and climbing upward, showing the way.

“After you,” says Natan, with a valetlike gesture. Radmer and Bordi have gotten separated somehow—Bruno can see them heading up toward the flau’s pinched little face—and he appears to be in the care of these two men once again. So he climbs the ropes himself, clambering past a network of rings and fishnet and flat leather straps.

The deck of the flau—if indeed that’s the proper term—is a woven mat remarkably like the deck of a traditional Tongan catamaran, except that the bark it’s fashioned from feels thicker and tougher, the strips much wider. All around it is a waist-high railing of something like bamboo—some light, stiff, hollow plant that looks gray under the night sky.

Immediately he’s set upon by a bare-chested little Luner man wearing a vest and pants and cylindrical cap of supple brown leather. “Who’s you?” the man demands in a thick New Tongue accent, and if the Dolceti have dispelled any notion of these “humans” being childlike or comical, this stocky, strutting, hypercephalic figure provides the counterpoint. “Older? Been y’ on a flau before? Don’ put tha down thar, foo!”

“Our steersman, Fander Kytu,” Zuq explains, leaning easily against the railing, which for him is nearly chest-high. “Don’t make him angry, or we’ll have a long night of it. Be assured, he’s the best in the world at what he does.”

“Bag,” says Fander, pointing to a netted-over heap near the deck’s stern.

“I’ll take it,” says Natan, relieving Bruno of his few meager possessions. Except the sword and pistol the Furies gave him, which he keeps in leather scabbards at his side. The sword is not an air foil. In fact, it’s not a real sword by any reasonable standard. It’s made of opaque forged steel, for one thing, without so much as a diamond coating to stiffen it and hold its edge. And it doesn’t vibrate or glow white-hot or anything, so if he’s to cut anything with it he’ll need to swing very hard indeed.

A blitterstaff would be much more the thing, but the Imbrians have made a mess of their remaining wellstone. Bruno was only able to salvage five staves from the entire façade, and they were of such unspeakable value here that to ask for one was to ask too much.

For that matter, the pistol they’ve given him would be little more than a toy in the Queendom. It fires thumbnail-sized metal bullets at only slightly more than the speed of sound! One well-placed shot is enough to fell a grown man, and a better-placed one will burst the junction box affixed to a robot’s head, with generally terminal results. But he will have to aim it himself, by eye and by hand.

Still, he’s seen too much of this world to want to travel it unarmed, and at the end of the day a blade is still a blade, and a projectile a projectile. He knows what to do with them.

“All board!” calls the steersman to the Dolceti, who are swarming up the rigging like they’ve been crewing such flights all their lives. Bruno catches sight of Radmer up by the bow. “Wind arising! Hook off! Cast by!”

And these commands—both to the Dolceti and to the minimal ground crew on the pavement below—suffice. Over the next half minute the mooring ropes are untied and the flau—swelling beneath them—becomes a thing independent of the ground on which it rests. Not airborne yet, but neither wholly in the thrall of gravity.

“She weighs only as much as a cow, if you can believe it,” Zuq says conversationally. “Even with her bladders flat, old Natan and I here could practically carry her where we’re going. But it is a fine thing, to ride the upslope on a winter’s night, with the light of Murdered Earth shining down all around.”

And as if in answer, the flau beneath them gives a final sigh of inflation, and lifts gently away from the planette.

It’s funny, Bruno thinks, that a black hole should be surrounded by so much light. But the halo of Murdered Earth—shaped like the stem and cap of a toppled mushroom—captures the full glory of Sol and tears it apart into nested rainbows. The whole thing is larger and brighter than the full moon had been in the skies of Old Earth.

And while it moves across the heavens on a twenty-eight-day cycle, first approaching the sun and then opposing it, it does not go through “phases” per se. It’s always bright, and washes out the sky so badly that he supposes most Lunites have never seen the Milky Way on anything but Earthless nights. There must be a lot of things they never see, and still more they’ve never heard or dreamed of.

Still, Lune’s jagged landscape is eerily beautiful by this varicolored glow. And the stars—what he can see of them—are peaceful, and since the flau is drifting eastward on the wind itself, at the speed of the wind, the air around it gives an impression of stillness, even as the Earthlit roads and farms roll by underneath. Ahead is the Sawtooth, the first range of the very tall Apenine mountains. Beneath them lies Aden Plateau, where Bruno and Radmer first landed in their sphere of brass. Lord, that was only forty hours ago—less than a day by the Luner clock. But it seems a longer time. Weeks.

“Look,” Zuq tells him at one point, “there goes another flau.”

And indeed, there it is, spread out above them and slightly south, pulling ahead in a stronger wind. Bruno can see its downward-pointing sail, so very much like the frills of Pup’s ever-slumbering leviathan. From this vantage he can get a sense of the creature’s entire shape, its natural form, which looks neither tortured nor artificial. In fact, from a distance it’s quite beautiful, an elegant blending of form and function.

He sees another one far below, its decks swarming with men and women in white jackets, singing some bittersweet melody. To celebrate their escape from the doomed city? To mourn it? But then, with a shock, he recognizes the faint tune itself: it’s Bascal Edward’s Song of Physics, which once sought to capture the essence of Queendom science in twenty memorable stanzas.

It’s beautiful. Bruno can barely make out the words, but it seems to him that the song has been passed down intact, in something close to the Old Tongue. And suddenly the tears are flowing freely from his eyes, for whatever sins might weigh against his son’s name, Bascal had risen to that particular challenge with all the grace and skill his genetics and training could muster. He’d been, if nothing else, a truly brilliant poet.

And of course any thought of Bascal is really a thought of Tamra, and this makes him leak saline just that much faster.

“Are you all right?” Natan asks him, coming over to lean his elbows on the railing. If Bruno tried that on this lightly rolling deck, he’d be pitched right over the edge the first time his attention wandered. But Natan is shorter, and surer of foot, and to Bruno’s surprise he sounds more than professionally concerned.

Angry at himself, Bruno wipes his eyes on a sleeve. “This is what old men do, I’m afraid. The grief comes upon us in unguarded moments.”

And Natan surprises him again by asking, “Was it real beautiful, your world? Your many, many worlds?”

“Indeed,” Bruno confirms, as a fresh wave of tears rolls down his cheeks. “It sounds fatuous to say it, I realize, but there was more beauty and wonder than you can imagine. Did we even notice at the time? But your own world is beautiful, too. Promise me this, guardsman: take nothing for granted in your flicker-short lifetime. Appreciate.”

“I will,” says Natan. “I do. Life is a precious gift.”

Still wiping his tears, Bruno chuckles at that. “An odd sentiment—don’t you think?—for an elite soldier in a sorely endangered country. Shouldn’t you be a Stoic?”

“Uh? I don’t know that word.”

“Er, silent. Economical in word and motion. Quietly suffering, to the point of simplemindedness.”

“Ah.” It’s Natan’s turn to chuckle. “We have no need of that, sir. That warrior mysticism, that claptrap. We don’t have to be that sterile. We have the blindsight training.”

Suddenly the wicker deck is creaking under bootsteps, and Radmer is there. “Ako’i?”

“I’m fine,” Bruno assures him, to forestall any involved discussion. The concern in Radmer’s voice is far less friendly, for Radmer’s duty is not to a person or an ideal, but to the human race generally. It’s a heavy burden, and admits little room for empathy or play. “Just reminiscing a bit.”

“That can be dangerous. Have you slept enough? Some of the men are tying down, over there on center-deck.”

“I’m not blind, Architect. I can see what’s happening five meters from my elbow.”

“Yes, well, you’ll need your rest for the climb. After we land, we’ll be ascending eight vertical kilometers in less than a hundred horizontally.”

“What’s our entry point?” asks Zuq, somewhere behind them all at the stern.

“Black Forest Pass,” Radmer answers, with such portentous foreboding that even Bruno, who’s never heard of the place, feels a shiver run through him at the prospect.

Chapter Seventeen in which light fails

Bruno finds himself brushing a quantum horse—white with black spots, like a negative image of the wide, unforgiving cosmos. This creature, he knows, has the power to carry him anywhere he wants to go. The catch being, he first has to go everywhere, and then collapse his waveform to a single location. And that seems an odd bargain to strike; there’s a faint whiff of brimstone on the air. But there’s a destination he must reach, an error of judgment he must correct before… before…

But the flau jostles beneath him, and the wicker deck creaks, and he opens his eyes to darkness. The dream flees to wherever it is that dreams go, and is forgotten. Although he doesn’t know it, Bruno has had this dream five times before, and the warnings buried within it have been a great, if vague, source of trouble to his waking mind.

“Where are we?” he asks, sitting up abruptly. The coarse rope around his waist draws taut.

“Landing,” says Zuq, who sits beside him as a man might sit by a campfire. For warmth, for a kind of company. Along the railing that circles the flau’s broad back, every third post is triple-high, with a paper lantern lashed to a hook. The lamps have been lit with electric bulbs, and from this vantage Bruno can see there are similar lamps as well on the ground below. Landing lights.

And the stars are still up there in the sky, though the Murdered Earth clings low above the clouds which hide the western horizon, and the sea. But there is something ineffably dark about this place. The light doesn’t quite seem to reach the ground, or else reaches it but is not reflected back. Indeed, outside of the tiny islands of illumination underneath the airfield lights, he can’t see the ground at all. He has no idea whether they’re landing in a valley or on a mountaintop, although something in the angle of the breeze implies neither. On a shelf, halfway up a steep mountainside? To the east there’s nothing but blackness, and the voices of men, calling out landing instructions, echo as if from a canted, irregular wall.

“Where are we physically?” he presses, frowning down at the knot that holds him. “The Sawtooth Mountains, obviously. But is this the pass?”

“Aye,” says Zuq. “The Black Forest herself. We’re about three and a half kilometers above sea level, on the Andrea Bench overlooking Aden. Due east of Timoch, give or take. The land rises eastward like a staircase.”

“I can’t see a thing,” says Bruno. His vision is still quite good—probably better than any of these “humans” can boast, but their trait of rapidly shifting skin pigment has made even Zuq into a shadow. It’s rather warm for a winter’s night in the high mountains, but dark skin will more readily absorb any ambient, radiant heat. In the cool and dark, these people, these humans, grow darker still.

“You’re not the only one,” answers Zuq. But he points to a faint glow, perhaps a hundred meters off the flau’s port side. “That’s Gillem Forta, the army base. Eight hundred men on station, and another fifty in semaphore shacks running all up and down the pass. Behind the main barracks there, you can just make out the highway.”

All Bruno can make out is the edge of a single building, and only because an electric lightbulb burns there in the gloom. There’s no road, no army base, no people at all except the airfield technicians, who are throwing ropes up to the waiting Dolceti under the disapproving glare of the steersman.

“You can’t see it from here,” Zuq continues, “but just the other side of the road is the Rayton Inn, where travelers catch their breath before the steepest part of the climb. Is it true blackberries come from the stars?”

“No, although they fared well in the soil of Planet Two, in the stormy skies of Barnard’s Star. They’re from Old Earth. Why do you ask?”

“Because the inn makes a fine blackberry pie, and an even finer blackberry beer, which they still call ‘the best in four worlds.’ I suppose they can call it whatever they like.”

“We’re not staying for pie,” says Radmer, walking up to them with a grim look. “Unless you want to reach the Stormlands at the height of morning thermals, when the gravel rains down, we must cross the pass summit by midnight, and the rim of Shanru Basin by the first light of dawn.”

“Black Forest at midnight,” Zuq marvels. “These are desperate times. I hope the road’s in good repair.”

“Parts of it,” Radmer says coolly. “But it can be done without roads at all. I once took a thousand men through this pass on a cloudy, Earthless night, without so much as a footpath to follow. In the other direction, the harder direction. And those were happy days, comparatively speaking.”

“The Davner War?” Zuq asks, marveling. He breaks into song for a moment: “When the Endistal Faction broke the Gower Monop’ly? / And the rivers of freedom ran red! Are you that Radmer?”

“I’m older than I look,” Radmer says, deadpan. And Bruno laughs, because to a trained eye the remains of this architect laureate appear very old indeed. But he’s struck again by the span of time this Irish lad has crossed, the events he’s been caught up in. Never one to leave well enough alone. Surely not to abandon a world to its fate. Not again, not another one.

“The Endistas’ role in that story is underappreciated,” Radmer adds thoughtfully. “Kung’s army had nothing to eat but sugar, and I kept saying they had to crash sometime. But they led us a long, frantic chase, and if not for the harrying of those recon units we might not have caught them before they hit the flatland. I had an unusually good team with me.”

To which Captain Bordi answers, from somewhere nearby, “Way I hear it, Radmer, every team with you on it is an unusually good team. By coincidence, you’ll say, but I assume my grandfather had reason for idolizing you the way he did.”

With a smirk in his tone, Zuq says, “Maybe something else. That ballad isn’t all about fighting, you know.” He breaks into song again: “Radmer stayed with Queen Monday for eight years and twenty / and she bore him five sons and a girl!”

“That’s enough, lad,” Bruno tells him gently. “No one likes to hear his old joys and sorrows reduced to a banjo ditty.”

“Ah. Okay.” Young Zuq sounds disappointed. There’s more fun to be had with this, his tone implies. He doesn’t seem to realize it could hurt as well.

Soon, though, the ladders are unrolled and the Dolceti are swinging down onto solid ground. Bruno is nearly the last to go, with only Zuq behind him. The sandy ground is coarse with sharp, angular pebbles that crunch and grind underfoot. The night is very black, and suddenly, inexplicably colder here at ground level.

“Why is it so dark?” Bruno can’t help asking. “I can see the western sky. We’re not in a valley, right? Where do all the photons go?”

“Solar trees,” one of the Dolceti answers over her shoulder. “This is the Black Forest.” The speaker is Parma, one of the “mission mothers.” Bruno isn’t clear on whether this is a formal rank or title, or a job assignment, or just some sort of nickname, but the lowest ranks among the Dolceti are “squad leaders” like Zuq, with “deceants” like Natan just above them. And both ranks act deferentially toward the two mothers, who are the only women in the group. The womens’ age is equally ambiguous; neither one has acquired the lines and sags of full-blown geriatry yet, but the bloom of youth isn’t prominent either. Bruno knows almost nothing about “human” physiology, but if he had to guess, he would put Parma’s age at around forty years.

Anyway. Solar trees, hmm. Is that supposed to be self-explanatory? The first hint of understanding comes as he watches the Dolceti appearing and disappearing around him. Not in the manner of Lyman’s Olders, with their stealth-mode inviz cloaks drawing kilowatts of power from hidden reserves, but in the manner of people walking behind pillars of superabsorber black. Once clear of the gravel airfield, they’ve moved in among a stand of trees. Very, very dark trees. The Dolceti are groping their way through, he realizes, with uncertain steps and their arms out ahead of them. Above Bruno, the starlight has been replaced by a roof of absolute blackness.

He touches one of the trees. Nearly runs into it, in fact, and is saved only by the envelope of cold air around it—characteristic of surfaces which absorb infrared but do not release it. He stops short and—gingerly—reaches out to brush the surface with his fingers. It feels slick, nearly featureless, interrupted only occasionally by small ridges or bumps. If it’s tree bark, it’s far smoother than birch or aspen or anything else he’s familiar with. And it’s cold, drinking in the heat of his fingertips. Reaching up, he can feel limbs as thick as his wrist, branching up and away at forty-five-degree angles.

“Are these natural?” he asks.

“They’re biological,” says Radmer’s disembodied voice, from some distance away. “They grow and die. They drop seeds and sprout forests. The soil conditions have to be just right, but where they are, the solar trees will choke out any other vegetation.”

Indeed, the ground remains a wasteland of sand and gravel, unbroken by grass or moss or even leaf litter. The spacing of the trees, too, is remarkably regular—a sort of honeycomb pattern. Because no tree can grow in the shadow of another, Bruno realizes, and because any open space will surely be colonized. The sprouts must fight it out for dominance, for survival itself, but the contest is rigged from the start: a tree at the edge of a clearing must eventually grow into the shadows of its neighbors, its energy budget forever restricted. A tree at the center of a clearing would have no such constraint, and could reach its full growth and potential without hindrance.

“This is one of the great failed experiments of early Lune,” Radmer expounds. “They were supposed to enrich the world, to bring infrastructure to its remotest corners. And they have, in a way. But the price is steep.”

“So now you’re older than the trees themselves?” Zuq asks, as though he only half believes it.

And Bruno tells him, “When our Radmer here first stood upon this sphere, son, there wasn’t even air. There wasn’t even gravity, not as you feel it now. It took him two hundred years to make a world of it. But he had built other worlds before this one.” He waves a hand at the sky. “Out there, among the stars. Where the blackberries grow.”

“Such sorcerers we have in our midst!” Zuq laughs, and again he’s only half joking. For the second time, Bruno feels a surge of sympathy for these unlucky people. To Zuq, this grotty little war is epic in scope! The history behind him seems unimaginably vast, with an uncertain future ahead and himself at the cusp, a young hero on a desperate quest. His humor is of the funereal variety; he expects his life to be violent and short. He expects his noble death to be written up in a song, if indeed his people survive at all.

Bruno feels a sudden urge to hug this young man, to rub his head, to offer some reassurance. But there’s nothing to say, for the situation really is desperate. And anyway Zuq is off in the trees somewhere, separated from Bruno by four meters of blackness. So fortunately the urge is not difficult to resist, and the lad escapes with his dignity intact.

Then, suddenly, Bruno and Radmer and the Dolceti are in a clearing, with buildings all around. It isn’t a natural clearing—black little sprouts and silver-gray stumps attest to the violence of its maintenance—but here the light can travel for more than a few meters. Here in this little bubble it can reflect, and re-reflect, and mingle with the starlight raining down from above.

“Bestnight,” says a soldier leaning in a doorway. It’s a Luner greeting Bruno has heard once or twice already. “Luck unto yer.”

“Danks,” replies Captain Bordi. “Luck en yer hold’n dis pass. We will’n no enemy et ours back, right?”

“Right,” the soldier agrees. There are other signs and sounds of activity here, but the place has a sleepy, dolorous feel to it. An air of fatalism, of doom. These ordinary soldiers are an afterthought in the epic; their job is simply to die, to hold the borders for a while and then be overrun. And yet there’s discipline here; there’s a man in every doorway, grimly standing his watch. At the side of the “highway”—really just a thin ribbon of tar and crushed rock—sits a shack atop a three-meter tower, with lamps burning brightly and three men waving semaphore flags up and down, left and right. Dutifully transmitting the nation’s network traffic by the effort of their own eyes and arms.

Bruno’s first surprise is the stream of refugees trickling uphill, against the pull of gravity. A family of four rolls by on a pair of six-wheeled scooters, whirring with the unmistakable tones of the old-fashioned electric motor. Up ahead, almost lost in the gloom, he can make out the lights of a slightly larger group. These are not traumatized people, hollow with the shock of murder and destruction. Indeed, he hears the sound of laughter drifting along the road, and the cases and trunks strapped to the vehicles show every sign of having been packed with care and forethought. These families have simply done the math, and concluded that the coastal lowlands of central Imbria are no longer the fashionable place to be.

And though Bruno is hardly in a position to criticize them, he asks, “Where are they going?”

“Manilus, probably,” Radmer answers. “It’s a large enough city to absorb a few extras. If their treaders hold out, if nothing breaks down, they’ll be behind city walls again by morning.”

“Will they be safe there?”

“For an extra few Luner days, I imagine. It hardly seems worth the effort, but people always do this. In a way it’s admirable: squeezing out the last few drops of the good life, refusing to buy into the gruesome promises of war. And more often than you’d think, some miracle really does intervene, and spare them the nightmares they’ve never quite believed in.”

“Well, then, why doesn’t everyone flee?”

“You’re asking me? I suppose the glib answer is that treaders—those vehicles, there—are expensive. But the real answer goes deeper than that. People are rarely eager to march into certain doom, but there are those who’ll stand their ground at any cost. And truthfully, it takes both kinds to clean up afterward. War after war, people like that have their spirits broken, while people like this survive with their illusions intact. And that’s what soldiers are for, Your Hi— er, Ako’i. If we cannot protect idealism, then there’s little point in protecting anything.”

“So you’re their miracle,” Bruno says, almost reproachfully.

“Sometimes,” Radmer admits. “When luck and timing allow it. But not for a very long while. I really was retired. I swore I’d never take another human life, and I’ve kept that promise. These people have no brickmail inside them, no wellstone, no fibrediamond or regeneration factors. When they lose an eye, it never grows back, and they get only a few years of practice to refine their skills.”

“And dolcet berries!” one of the Dolceti chimes in. “I reckon those helps us a bit!”

There is scattered laughter at that remark, but Radmer presses on. “For me to fight against these children—even in the cause of justice—was terribly unfair. Such battles are their own to win or lose. It’s their world.”

“Hmm. Yes. But these new enemies come from without. You’ve roused yourself from the fireside at last—roused me as well!—to strike down a foreign invader who upsets the balance of power you’ve so carefully cultivated. To protect your children.”

“Don’t romanticize it,” Radmer warns. “I did have children of my own, once.”

And Bruno answers, “As did I. There’s nothing pretty about this mess, but having agreed to participate, I do mean to understand it.”

Bruno’s second surprise is that there are twenty-two of those six-wheeled vehicles, those “treaders,” waiting for him and his escorts. Fully equipped, yes, and with a pair of army lads standing guard to make sure the travelers and inn guests don’t have a chance to swipe anything.

“Someone has called ahead,” Bruno says, impressed.

To which Radmer reacts with irritation. “What kind of place do you think this is? Yes, it’s still the Metal Ages here, but we didn’t have wellstone and fax machines in the colonies, either. Not after the first couple of centuries. Did that make us uncivilized? Even badly outnumbered, the Eridanians defeated the Queendom of Sol.”

“Meaning no offense,” Bruno says mildly, for he’s tired of taking the blame for his ignorance. Plenty of blame attaches to him for other reasons, but this at least is not his fault. When he lived here, briefly, it was another age entirely. The Iridium Days, yes. He’s never heard the songs of Lune’s history, never even glanced at a current political map for more than a few seconds. How could he? And anyway, it was entropy that defeated the Queendom. The Eridanians were simply there at the time.

Soon, Natan is showing Bruno how to mount a treader. There’s no great trick to it—there were electric motorcarts of similar design in Old Girona, and alcohol-powered scooters in the islands of Tonga, which Bruno and his family had occasionally ridden. But the treader is more complex, better balanced. Bruno sees at once that its six wheels, cunningly articulated, will keep the chassis approximately level through considerable variance in the terrain. These are off-road vehicles, deigning for the moment to travel a ribbon of pavement.

In another minute they’re off and rolling, a loose pack of riders with Bruno and Radmer at the protected center. They’re not moving all that fast—forty kilometers per hour, perhaps a little less—but the progress is steady, and the treaders seem little troubled by the steepness of the climb. Neither their motors nor the wind noise is loud enough to be troublesome. Indeed, it’s an eerily silent way to travel, like flying a glider low and slow, not touching the ground at all. But Bruno is glad he’s not riding out in front, for the treaders’ headlight beams travel only as far as the next little curve, where they’re swallowed by the superabsorber blackness of the forest.

“This is the most direct route,” Radmer tells him apologetically. “Flau have been known to reach an altitude of six kilometers, but their gas bladders suffer permanent damage, and they’re too hypoxic to follow navigation commands. Even in emergencies such as this, their service ceiling is capped at four kilometers. But Gillem is the highest airfield in Imbria, and one of the highest on Lune, and the Black Forest Pass will lead us to Tillspar.”

“The bridge?”

“Right. And once we’re across the divide into East Highrock, we can follow the old Junction Highway—what remains of it—east to the base of the Blood Mountains, where the Stormlands begin. The northern route, through a town called Viewpoint, would be a flatter, brighter way to pass the night, but it would take four hours longer. It’s a delay we can ill afford.”

“And the southern route,” Bruno says, trying to picture the jagged land around him, “cuts through the north of Nubia, where our enemies are as thick as flies.”

“Right,” Radmer says again. “So Black Forest it is.” He looks around at the shapeless dark. “Was it like this during the Light Wars? This dark, I mean? Every building greedily drinking in the energy around it, heedless of courtesy or the greater good?”

With the wind in his face, Bruno laughs humorlessly. “Believe it or not, lad, the Light Wars were before my time. My parents were born in that period, but even they were sheltered from it, for Catalonia had stern regulations about wellstone. It had to be locally produced, inefficiently and at great cost, or else it was subject to tariffs. It still found its way in, of course, but rarely in anything as bulky or expensive as a building. And in Girona, where my parents lived and died, there were social taboos attached to it as well. The people weren’t fanatics, but they favored a kind of technological puritanism. A hands-on approach, if you will. As a boy, I sometimes wore clothing woven from the wool of actual sheep!”

“And yet,” Radmer says in tones of mock accusation, “you turned the world of physics on its head. You changed everything.”

“I did,” Bruno agrees. “Almost as soon as my parents were buried. And I fear I’d do it all over again if I had the choice! But it was that Old Modern styling that made the Sabadell-Andorra earthquake so deadly when it hit. I wasn’t the only one turning my back on it; the whole world was shaken, looking for a new path, a new monarch to lead the way into a brighter future. And in that sense, my research wasn’t a betrayal of Girona’s ideals at all; it was very hands-on. It put the deadly fringes of quantum physics right there at your fingertips.”

“Just how old are you, Ako’i?” asks Zuq, who is riding along just a few meters away. “You’re talking about Old Earth, right? Before Tara and Toji conquered the solar system.”

Bruno laughs again. “Tara and Toji, was it? Yes, lad, I remember their conquests well.” Then, in a more maudlin tone: “Such memories linger far beyond their usefulness. It’s a cruel sort of prank, for the past seems palpably close, even when the last of its keepsakes have turned to dust.”

Chapter Eighteen in which a harbinger of battle is vindicated

On a road made of gravel and tar, the occurrence of frost heaves and potholes can hardly be surprising. Particularly as the altitude rises up above the permanent snow line, which in this country hovers around seven kilometers. Nor can the effects of hypoxia be overlooked, for on Lune the atmosphere halves in pressure with every five kilometers of height. In this, at least, the post-Queendom humans are resilient, for they can subsist on partial pressures of oxygen as low as thirty millibars, or one-fifth the sea-level norms of Old Earth. But their metabolism slows accordingly, dulling their reactions.

Thus, when the Dolceti’s lead treader, piloted by a young man named Vick of Greening, hits a patch of invisible ice on a hairpin turn and continues straight on into a lethal rock face, no one is surprised. Indeed, the surprising thing is that the two treaders in his wake manage to brake to a halt without leaving the road or triggering a massive pileup. But just the same, Bordi orders a refueling halt and a chance for the Dolceti to stretch their legs, to catch their breath, to revive their senses on something more than the blackness of the forest pass.

“Shall we bury the body?” Bruno asks Natan, who is the most senior Dolceti he feels he actually knows.

“If you like,” Natan replies, “but the Gillem patrols will do a better job of it when they find him. If the wolves don’t find him first.”

“Hmm. That seems a bit callous. Did you know him? Was he a friend?”

“We’re all friends,” Natan says with no particular emphasis. “I’ll miss him. But I’m embarrassed for him, too. That stupid son of a pig has eaten the berry and taken the training.”

“Had the reflexes and didn’t use them,” Zuq agrees, and there are murmurs of assent all around as the Dolceti walk their treaders off the road.

“Would you rather he’d died in battle?” Bruno asks, partly out of politeness and partly because he’s genuinely curious. This isn’t the reaction he would have expected.

And Natan compounds Bruno’s confusion by laughing. “In battle? Against whom? Dying is sloppy.”

“Er, perhaps if the odds were overwhelming?”

“All the more reason to duck out of the way, I’d say.”

And with that, Bruno feels his first tingling of unease about these Dolceti. Is this bravado a part of their esprit de corps, or do they simply lack a background in failure? “Anyone can die,” he cautions. “Everyone will, including yourself. If you fail to believe that, you’ll never take the proper steps to protect yourself.”

“You’re telling me?” Natan says, unimpressed. “I took a vow, sir. I’m dead already. But I’m still effective, see? Still enjoying the pleasures of life. When I finally screw up, I don’t want nobody being proud of me for it.”

“I’ll spit on your grave, sir,” Zug offers, to general laughter.

But Natan answers, “You’ll lose it before I do, boy. Even blind, you’re too slow on the left. Got a lazy limbic, you.” Then to Bruno he says, “Come on, I’ll show you how to recharge your treader.”

And this too is perplexing, because Natan is rolling his own vehicle into the trees. Is there some sort of fuel depot back there? In this nowhere spot on this nowhere road? But the man drops a kickstand, pulls out a pair of sharp metal spikes, and unreels a few meters of two-stranded, rubber-insulated cable. And finally Bruno understands.

“The trees store an electric charge.”

“Course they do,” Natan says, pulling out a mallet and driving the longer of the two spikes into the black-on-black trunk of the nearest specimen. “What do you think they’re for?” He pounds in the shorter spike a hand’s breadth below the longer one, and suddenly a yellow electric lamp is glowing where the handlebars of the treader meet in the center.

And now Bruno can picture it: a dielectric in the “bark” and “wood” which drives electrons inside the trunk and won’t let them back out again. Or ions, perhaps, if the storage medium is chemical rather than capacitive, but either way they’d be separated by a barrier layer, which the longer spike is designed to penetrate. Half of it had been insulated with some sort of tar compound, yes? To keep it from shorting against the outer layer, which makes contact only with the shorter spike. Current flows, yes, but only through the storage battery of the treader.

The electrical systems of Timoch suddenly make more sense to Bruno. Is electricity a harvestable commodity here, like grain or walnuts? Is it shipped to the city in barrels and consumed directly, without transmission over long wires?

“How long does it take to charge?” he asks Natan, whose shrug is barely perceptible in the darkness.

“Depends on the tree, but most will charge a lot more batteries than a treader can carry away. And the more charge they have, the faster they deliver it. Call it half an hour, more or less.”

Right away this tells Bruno that the trees and treader batteries are chemical in nature, because capacitors or superconductors could be slam-charged or discharged in mere fractions of a second. But they must be big, clever batteries to store so much energy, and the charging circuitry must be fairly sophisticated or the batteries would deteriorate in mere months. Yet again Bruno finds himself reassessing his opinions of Luner culture and technology.

So he hammers in his own spikes and goes off to look for Radmer, to obtain a complete explanation.

Unfortunately, Radmer isn’t in a talking mood. He’s found a laminated wooden helmet of the sort worn by civilian treader pilots.

“The force of the blow,” he’s saying to Bordi, and pointing to a gore-spattered gash across the laminate, “is considerable. The blood is still tacky. Bandits would hide such evidence, not leave it beside the road. There’ll be bodies nearby, and not a scrap of metal anywhere near them.”

“Alert for danger!” Bordi calls out to his men. “Search the area by fours!”

“The refugees?” Bruno asks.

Radmer looks up from the helmet and says nothing.

“Why would they target civilians?” Bruno presses. “What’s to be gained? They can’t be acting out of malice.”

“Greed,” Radmer corrects. “Civilians carry metal, and the robot scouts are careful not to leave witnesses behind. And if they were traveling on the road we’d’ve heard the alert drums; there’d be semaphore towers dropping off the network left and right. The patrol must have been traveling north, just cutting across the pass, and these people were simply unlucky. Wrong place at the wrong time. With a rich haul the robots would have turned back to the south, to deliver it to some Nubian foundry, or maybe take it all the way back to Astaroth. We don’t really know what they do with it, except that their numbers swell in proportion with the tonnage they cart away.”

“They’re feeding a fax machine,” Bruno says, eyeing a little termite mound beside the road. “Nothing else makes sense, and anyway it’s a fine, cheap way to conquer the world. To raze it, to impose a viewpoint upon it and build it afresh. If you had the machine, I daresay you’d be tempted to try a stunt like this yourself. All they need is metal.”

While he speaks, Bruno keeps his eyes on the termite mound. What do these creatures live on, he wonders, here in this solar-tree desert? He crouches to watch them streaming in and out of their nest, but in the darkness he can’t see what, if anything, they’re carrying. To feed themselves, to swell their ranks. To fill the planette to the very brink of its termite-carrying capacity. He’s impressed that they continue working in this total darkness, but given the trees, he supposes it might not be much brighter during the day.

“And it’s a bad sign,” he continues, “to find scouts this high, this far north. How many patrols are in these mountains right now? How long before they identify us as a strategic threat, as opposed to a merely tactical one?”

“These robots got eyes,” volunteers one of the Dolceti. “Not in their faces, maybe, but they see things.”

And Bruno says, grimly, “Perhaps more than you think. Even if these termites were natural, it would be a trivial exercise to reprogram their colonies to serve as sensor networks.”

“Well,” says Radmer, “aren’t you a barrel of laughs?”

From the forest comes a strange cry: Thawt! Thawt!

“The owls seem to think so,” Bruno says dryly. But Radmer and the searching Dolceti tense up at the sound, looking around nervously.

“What is it?” Bruno asks.

“A thrat,” says Bordi, his eyes on the forest.

“A threat?”

“A thrat,” Radmer corrects. “A sort of bird you find sometimes in the solar-tree forests, or the pine barrens. There it is. Do you see?”

Bruno looks where Radmer is pointing, and where the black of forest meets the deep, dark blue of sky he can just barely make out an avian form atop the cone point of one of the trees. Its beak is raised up toward the stars, its wings outstretched.

Thwat? Thwat?

“Is it dangerous?”

“No,” says Radmer, “but its wings are laced with nerves so sensitive… well, people say it can read minds.”

“Ah. I see. And can it really?”

“I’m not sure. They do seem to know when they’re being hunted. Try pointing a weapon at one; you’ll find it gone before you’ve even finished thinking. For the princes of the Second Dynasty, to bring home a live thrat was considered the ultimate quest. The logic being, it would only come to you if there was genuine kindness in your heart—a thing that couldn’t be faked.”

“And did they?”

“Eh?”

“Come to these princes. Did a prince ever capture a thrat, and become a king?”

“Once,” Radmer says distractedly. “King Minor of Daum. He was a really good guy. Funny, and very strong. Tried to make a sort of lie detector out of it, but it looked so sad in its cage, he finally released it. It’s still on the family crest, though.”

“All right, so,” Bruno says, beginning now to lose patience, “if this bird is harmless, then why are we so tense all of a sudden?”

ThooRAT! ThooRAT!

“Because it drinks the blood of corpses,” Radmer says evenly, his eyes on the blank wall of forest. “With a taste for adrenaline and the stink of fear, it’s the harbinger of battle. In the opinion of that bird, Sire, someone is about to die.”

“Oh. Well.” Bruno’s weapons are of the usual sort: a sword and pistol, some glue bombs, and a stout metal rod for, in theory, holding an enemy outside of sword-thrust range. He takes quick stock of them, and finally draws the pistol.

Just in time, as it turns out; the robots burst through the trees, swarming across the road like a troupe of whirring, clicking ballerinas. Before he knows it, Bruno is firing wildly, then firing more carefully as a robot engages a Dolceti just a few meters away from him. His bullet misses its target—the iron box on the side of the robot’s head—and clanks off its superreflective neck without leaving a mark.

Then the glue bombs are flying, splattering in sticky masses that trip and snare the robots but slide right off human flesh. And the guns are popping, and the swords and clubs are swinging, and the air foils are flickering in the darkness. Men call out to each other, and Bruno finds himself face-to-face with a robot attacker. He’s fought robots before, and feels no particular fear as he whirls the iron bar into play and strikes for the side of the thing’s head. The box! Hit the box! But his aim is as worn-out as the rest of his ancient body; he misses by inches, and he senses the blow wasn’t hard enough anyway, to do more than dent the metal.

He isn’t afraid, no, but he’s disappointed. The robot’s sword is coming around now, and he has no way to block it except by throwing an arm up over his head. Will it be enough? Will he live to see the Stormlands, or the ancient city hidden within? Will he not confront the mistakes and misdeeds of his past?

The razor-sharp sword strikes his arm with the force of a pile driver, shearing right through the skin and the outer layer of fibrediamond and cutting into the muscle beneath. He feels the bone chip, and his strength is insufficient to keep the sword from continuing downward, to ring painfully against his Imbrian army helmet. The shock leaves him dazed, but a part of him is swinging the bar around anyway, with all the strength his good arm can muster. It isn’t much, but it pushes the robot back for a moment, delaying the final, killing blow.

And then Zuq is there with a hard body slam to the robot’s impervium hull, and Bordi is ducking beneath the whirling sword blade and stabbing directly into the box with the diamond tip of an air foil. The robot tries to dodge, to parry, but the void in the middle of the weapon simply baffles it. The point digs in, punching through the thin sheet of iron, and the robot is falling away in a kind of seizure.

And that’s it. The battle is over. The ground is littered with twitching robots and severed robot limbs.

“Ako’i!” says Bordi, looking at Bruno with considerable alarm. To someone else he says, “Throw a tourniquet around that shoulder! Lose the arm, not the man!”

“Excuse me,” Bruno tells him, collapsing down onto his rump. A tourniquet won’t help, he wants to say. The arm isn’t severed, just mauled, and what it really needs is to have the edges of the wound sewn back together. His body will do the rest, knitting skin and bone and muscle with better-than-human efficiency. The fibrediamond will not grow back, alas, and the bone is unlikely to heal perfectly around its dented brickmail sheathing. He’ll have a permanent scar, a permanent ache. But with proper first aid, amazingly enough, he and his arm will both survive.

He can’t get the words out, though, because his pain receptors are functioning perfectly, and no matter how wonderfully reinforced his skull might be, the brain inside it remains a fragile pudding of delicate bioelectric tendrils. It’s also reinforced, and not given to internal bleeding, but just the same he’s dazed, torpid. His bell has been rung.

Fortunately, Radmer is there in another few seconds, and takes charge of the medical response. Bruno watches with dizzy detachment as a needle and thread are worked through the injury, lacing it together. His eyes are inspected with lights, his reflexes tested.

“You’ll live,” Radmer pronounces finally. “But it’s going to hurt for a day or two.”

“Noted,” Bruno says muzzily.

“You’re going to have to ride, I’m afraid. If we carry two on a treader, it’ll slow us down.”

“I understand. I’ll muddle through. These… these Dolceti are very fast, aren’t they? The best fighters in the world.”

“You didn’t fare so badly yourself,” Bordi says, with some grudging cousin of admiration. “I thought they’d killed you. The moment that robot stepped in front of you I said to myself, ‘That’s it. He’s dead.’ But you actually hit the thing, twice.”

“It was in my way,” Bruno said, trying to make a joke of it. Then, more seriously, “Has anyone got some water? Fighting really takes it out of you. I’ve lived a long, long time, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite this thirsty before.”

Someone hands him a bottle, and he drinks from it greedily, trying to slow the rasp of his breathing so he won’t choke. Finally he says to Radmer, “So there. Your thrat-bird was wrong.”

“Not at all,” Radmer says grimly, pointing to a heap on the road which Bruno had taken for a pile of oil-stained rags. But on closer inspection he can see the “oil” spreading in a pool, and a pair of pointy boots sticking out of the heap. It’s Parma, the mission mother. Minus the top of her head.

“Sloppy,” someone notes, in tones of mild embarrassment. “You can see she was half a step too close.”

Chapter Nineteen in which a great gulf is spanned

The long night just keeps on getting cooler, and as the road climbs higher and higher into the thin mountain air, the last traces of Imbria’s temperate winter fall away. Not all of the Dolceti had started off the journey in riding leathers, but before setting off from the scene of the battle they’d all zipped up, and before long they were stopping again to throw vests and parkas over the leathers, and mitten-tops over the fingers of their gloves. Progress slows, and slows again as the slipstream turns to icy daggers.

“Cold enough?” Zuq asks Bruno at one point, and in his addled state, with his face half-frozen beneath a muffle of soft cloth, Bruno can only manage a grunt in reply.

Finally, as the solar trees peter out into scraggly tundra and then bare rock, it actually becomes possible to see the semaphore towers, which roll by every few kilometers. It must be cold duty manning these stations, Bruno thinks, though not nearly as cold or wearying as the long ride between them.

Finally, Bordi calls another halt. “It would be nice to sleep in Highrock,” he says to Radmer. “But we’re cold and tired already. Let’s get some rest and then regroup for the final push across the summit.”

Radmer carries a pocket watch—a sort of mechanical contraption for ticking off the hours and minutes of the day. Or the night; its hands and numerals glow with the phosphorescent green of radium. He makes a show of checking it now, and as he pops the cover open it casts his face in a sickly light. “Five hours, Captain. No more than that.”

And Bordi answers, “The general is most kind.”

So they make camp, and Natan shows Bruno how to unroll his bivvy, which is a thing that owes its ancestry to sleeping bags and canopy beds and one-man tents but is different from all of these. On the bottom, stiff tendrils of closed-cell foam provide both padding and insulation against the rocky ground. On the top, stiff arches of cloth keep a vented air space above his head, keeping out the wind—or the rain and snow, if there were any. And in the middle are layers of padding which, for a substance not composed of quantum dots, are surprisingly warm and light.

Bruno is asleep before he can draw twenty breaths, and mercifully, the Quantum Horse declines to visit him this time. Still, when Zuq rouses him he resists at first, unable to believe that five hours have really elapsed. “Find your amusement elsewhere, lad!”

But Zuq is both understanding and persistent. “It’s time to go, Ako’i. Come on, I’m responsible for you. Come out of there and pack up.”

There is a hasty meal of nuts and raisins and little flavored bits of dried chicken, washed down with water that has begun to freeze in its bottles.

“How much farther is the summit?” Bruno asks Radmer as the two of them stow their gear aboard the treaders.

“A couple of hours, if we hurry. The people of Highrock need to be warned; if the enemy is here in Black Forest already, Tillspar will be a major target for them, both strategically and materially.”

“A lot of metal, is it?”

“Wellstone, actually. And a lot of it, yes. More importantly, as the only bridge across the Divide, it’s a critical link between East Imbria and the coastal cities. Without it, Manilus and Duran and Crossroad will be cut off. That’s a third of the republic, geographically speaking, and nearly a fifth of its people.”

The night has grown colder still, and there’s a stiff breeze blowing, but at least here there are no solar trees drinking in what little heat remains. The men—and the sole woman left among them—saddle up and go, beneath the river of the Milky Way and the watchful eyes of Orion. The stars, barely twinkling, are as clear here as they would be on the surface of an ordinary planette. You’d need a space suit to get a better view. Murdered Earth is hidden by the mountains; only the glow of headlights interferes.

Still, it’s slow going up here in the cold and thin, and they crest several false summits which prove, to Bruno’s sinking spirits, to have even higher, steeper mountains behind them. Indeed, when they’ve truly reached the top of the pass, Bruno doesn’t realize it until he sees the lights of a small town, kilometers in the distance and slightly below their current position.

“Is that Highrock?” he calls out to Radmer, now several treaders away in the pack.

“Aye,” Radmer confirms. “If you look, you can even make out the bridge.”

And it’s true; past a sharp turn and a fork in the road, Bruno can see the town nestling on either side of some dark expanse, and between them the inverted, caternary arches of a suspension bridge, its cables strung up with electric lights. It’s a scene straight out of his childhood, and it brings another pang of nostalgia. Oh, for those simpler days! But it’s a false longing and he knows it, for the simple life is never simple, nor safe. The Queendom, for all its faults and programmed failures, was a place more worthy of his pining.

“That’s a river, then?” he asks Radmer.

And Radmer laughs. “There is a river, yes, carrying meltwater westward to the Imbrian Sea. On the other side it flows east to Tranquility, where the site of Luna’s first human visit lies submerged under eighty meters of briny ocean. But there’s more to the Divide than that.”

“How so?”

“You missed the Shattering, Ako’i. It’ll be easier to explain when we’re actually on Tillspar, looking down.”

They ride onward, and at the outskirts of the village they encounter a lighted guard shack, with a sort of vestigial gate blocking the road, consisting of little more than a horizontal boom which can be pivoted up out of the way.

“Bestnight. What bin’z, then?” asks one of the two guards in the shack. But the other one, recognizing Radmer in the pack, steps forward in surprise, then finally moves to the doorway and walks out. “Radmer! My God! I never thought we’d lay eyes on you again!”

Radmer chuckles at that. “Oh, ye of little faith. You think a vanishing dot in the sky is the last you’ll see of me? I’m harder to get rid of than that.”

“But we saw it hit the ground! That capsule of yours, a gleam of light in the setting sun!”

“You saw it cross the horizon,” Radmer corrects, “at an altitude of ten thousand kilometers and climbing. Really, Elmer, if the course was plotted by the astronomer Rigby, and the capsule and catapult were overseen by no less than Mika’s Armory and the watchmaker Orange Mayhew, then it’s Highrock’s reputation at stake more than my own sorry skin. Is this or is this not the Artisans’ Pinnacle?”

“Aye,” the guard agrees, “yours was a finely crafted delusion. Wheels and chains, bombs and hatches! A fitting tomb for such as you, big brass balls and all. No offense to the men what built it, sir, but I’m surprised to see you just the same.”

“Well,” Radmer says, pulling out a set of travel orders to show off as a formality, “perhaps you could send word to the mayor, let her know I’m here.”

“I’ve rung the bell already,” the guard assures him.

Soon, the other riders are shouldered aside and Radmer is surrounded by a milling throng of villagers, talking over one another in a rapidly rising din. “How did that air filter work? Radmer? Radmer! Did the wheel springs seize at all? Did the dinite charges hurt when they went off? Where did these Dolceti come from?”

It’s the mayor herself who rescues him, striding along the cobblestone avenue in a green robe, with some sort of golden ceremonial pendant dangling from her neck.

“So. How many lives does a scoundrel have?”

Radmer looks up, suddenly pleased and sheepish, vaguely off balance. “More than he can count, Your Honor. I’m pleased to see you again.”

“I should say the same to you.” She clucks, looking him up and down. “In one piece, no less. That’s good. Did you find what you were looking for up there?”

“I did,” Radmer answers, presenting Bruno with a flourish.

“Hmm.” The mayor then turns her appraising eyes upon this even older Older, who is immediately reminded of his wife. Tamra used to look at Bruno exactly like that—interested, curious, vaguely exasperated—whenever things were just starting to go askew. A couple of years ago, it seemed. A couple of hundred at the very most. “And is he worth your worldly fortune, General? We’re living quite well on the wages you paid us.”

To which Radmer answers, “If he’s not, Your Honor, then you should spend the money while you can. The Glimmer King has scouting patrols in this pass already. I fear it won’t be long before they’re coming for Tillspar in force.”

Her smile is vaguely condescending. “The bridge has stood since the Shattering itself, General. It was built, I understand, by the very architect who crushed this world from the husk of a lifeless moon. Chairmain Kung of the Gower Monopoly once struck it with a blitterstaff, if I recall the story correctly, and the bridge rang like a gong and stood firm. And there’ve been lesser attempts by lesser villains, which accomplished nothing at all.”

“Kung struck only one blow,” Radmer says, “before I pitched him over the railing. Two minutes later you could still hear him screaming, all the way down. We never did find the staff. If we hadn’t been there to stop him, he’d’ve fared a lot better.”

She arches an eyebrow. “Your point being?”

“I won’t be here to help, Your Honor. Not this time.”

“We’ve got a full garrison,” she reminded him, sounding annoyed.

“So did every outpost in Nubia. Against this enemy, a few hundred men are no defense at all.”

She leans close, dropping her voice to a murmur. “What do you want me to say, Rad? We’ll hold it for as long as we can, and if we fail we’ll go down fighting. Is that what you want to hear? This is Highrock. It’s our bridge, and anyway we’ve got a few surprises up our skirt.”

“I expect you do,” he concedes.

The two of them look at each other for a long moment, until Radmer finally asks, “Where are Orange and Mika?”

“On the bridge, if you can believe it. Cocking the VLC for a shot down the pass.”

“Well, bless their little hearts.”

“Yes.”

Another long moment passes.

“You’re not staying,” she says. “Not even for a few hours.”

“No. I’m sorry, but we’ve had enough delays already. We need to be through the Stormlands before the midmorning thermals kick in.”

“Stormlands.” She clucks, shaking her head slightly. “You sure know how to pick your battles, General.”

“Aye,” he agrees sadly. “It’s always been my greatest talent.”

Soon the riders are rolling on, right through this gingerbread town, leaving the gate and the guards and the mayor behind.

“So, Radmer,” Zuq wants to know, “what color are her nipples?”

The buildings of Highrock have straight, high, rectangular walls of gray mortar and smooth yellow river rock, ranging from fist sized to head sized. The roofs are of wooden shingle, sprouting key-shaped chimneys of tin tied down with steel cables. The whole place smells of burning wood, and Bruno can see wagonloads of cut-up logs in alleys and behind the houses, awaiting their own turn in the furnace.

Apparently the weather is highly thought of here, for every roof seems to sport a vane to indicate the wind’s direction, and a cup anemometer to gauge its speed. There are black-painted water tanks on the roofs as well, nestled close to the chimneys to keep from freezing. At first glance, the bridge doesn’t seem like anything special. The far side of the Divide, perhaps a kilometer distant, gives no real clue as to just how far down the bottom is. But as they draw nearer, the walls of the chasm go down, and down, and down some more.

On the bridge itself, Bruno quickly realizes that this “Divide” is no mere riverbed. Its sides—separated by a thousand meters of blackness—drop away almost vertically, and although the edges are jagged as lightning, the overall course of the thing is almost perfectly east-west. In total darkness it might’ve baffled Bruno’s senses completely, but during the long night, Murdered Earth has overshot the sun and can be seen on the eastern horizon, right through the crack of the Divide itself. And in the other direction, through haze and darkness, Bruno fancies he can see all the way down to the Imbrian Sea, now hundreds of kilometers west of him, and ten kilometers down. Indeed, what else could that be? That muzzy juncture between ground and sky?

Where the mountains fall away to the east, below the rising Earth, the crack runs together as a pair of converging lines before seeming, at some impossibly remote point, to take a sudden and decisive turn to the northwest. Below, there is only darkness and the howl of wind. And this is telling indeed, if Bruno can see the horizon through the gap in the rock!

“This is a crevasse,” he diagnoses for Radmer’s assessment. “A single seismic crack down the spine of the entire mountain range. Very deep.”

“Very,” Radmer agrees. “Beneath Tillspar, the river Arkis sits only two hundred meters above sea level. Its source, a wellspring eighteen kilometers upstream, is only two hundred meters higher than that.”

Although Bruno has seen some large artifacts in his day, he cannot help being impressed. A crack in the earth ten kilometers deep! The Shattering must have been a violent event indeed, and a sudden one. No wonder the world had fallen again into ruin!

The bridge itself is an interesting bit of retrofit; the road runs right to its edge and then turns to a bed of wooden planks that look as though they’ve been freshly laid. And these planks are secured at the center and edges by simple iron bolts, whose patina of recent oxidation is evident even by the weak electric lights strung up along the bridge. They’ve been in place for weeks, not millennia, and from the look of it they won’t last out the century.

As for what the planks are bolted into, why, that’s another story altogether. The superreflector gleaming of impervium and Bunkerlite is unmistakable, and yet these substances are encased in something translucent and ordinary: a glass, a clear resin. The suspension cables are thicker than Bruno himself, and they fire into the rock face at a twenty-degree angle, where they’re held fast by a larger-than-life system of plates and bolts and old-fashioned threaded nuts.

“Nice design,” he notes.

“Thank you,” Radmer acknowledges, “but I was only peripherally involved. The bulk of the engineering was handled by Bell Daniel.”

“Of Lunacorp Construction? My goodness, I remember him.”

“He lived a couple hundred years past the Shattering. Died of electrocution, if you can believe it, trying to wire up some old apartment building. Anyway, yes, there were a lot of Olders still around back then, looking forward to a long future, and they financed Tillspar, which was consequently built to last. These cable stays are longer than the bridge itself, anchored a full kilometer into the toughest bedrock in the whole region. The structural members are layered composites of programmable and traditional materials, and the programmable ones have every security feature and safety lockout we could scrape together at the time. I don’t want to use the word ‘tamper-proof,’ because nothing ever is. But it’s certainly tamper-resistant. I’d have a hard time changing the thing myself; Bell scrambled all the passwords at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.”

“And it was from here that you launched yourself to Varna? That’s your Very Large Catapult, there?”

Bruno points at a system of large reels and pulleys mounted behind one of the railings, near the center of the bridge.

“Yep, that’s it. Thirty turns on a block-and-tackle, plus a counterweight thirty times the mass of the capsule. If you allow ten kilometers of throw, the pull of gravity really adds up! It’s not a ride I’d recommend—not so gentle as the explosion that kicked us off Varna—but it’s tolerable.”

“Gentle? I don’t recall anything gentle about that.”

“Well it’s all relative, isn’t it? It depends how badly you want to go. The only really difficult part was hacking the bridge to harvest a sufficient length of impervium wire. It made such a mess that we finally had to replace the whole road surface, as you can see. It’s a rush job; someday I’ll come back and fix the thing properly.”

“If you survive.”

“Aye. If any of us do.”

Even after watching half a dozen Dolceti roll out ahead of him, driving his treader onto the planks and out over empty space is, for Bruno, an act of faith. He has never trusted the flammable, frangible substance known as wood, and indeed it creaks and bends alarmingly under the weight of his treader, and the many other treaders around him. The planks are knotty, bumpy, warped, not with age but from having been harvested too young. Bruno remembers the sawmill near his father’s bistro, and the sorry planks it cut from local wood. There was a shortage of old-growth forest in Catalonia then, and clearly there was one on Lune now, at least in this mountainous region. And why not, when wood was at once an ornament, a structural material, a fuel, and a source of durable fiber? And electricity!

But Radmer, seeing his look, is quick to offer assurances. “Even in its current state, sir, Tillspar could easily carry ten times this load. There are greater problems to worry about.”

“Er, yes. Perhaps. But not deeper ones.”

The planks are separated by significant gaps—three or four centimeters in places!—through which Bruno can see rock walls converging down into a yawning blackness. From here, for all he can tell, the Divide might reach all the way to the center of the planette. And through these gaps the wind whistles, producing a light, tickly sensation on the soles of his feet, as though he’s not wearing boots at all. He can also feel the bridge swaying beneath him, a few centimeters back and forth, back and forth like the seat of a gigantic swing. Has this thing really stood for two millennia and more?

At first, the mountain slopes gently beneath the planks, but about thirty meters out the ground drops away sharply, and the wind picks up. It’s less bitingly cold than the air of the mountains, though; this is a warm draft welling up from the high-pressure spaces below. The bridge is suspended from a pair of towers, driven into opposite faces of the Divide at a sixty-degree angle. At the first tower is a plaque, bronze in color but utterly untouched by weather or corrosion or time. It might have been cast this morning. In the spotlights shining on it, it reads:

Beyond the plaque, the bridge begins to feel even less secure. It rises and falls by several centimeters at a time, and when Bruno looks along the handrail he sees little transverse waves rolling back and forth across it, faster than a man could run. Near the center of the bridge, it’s like walking on a ship, or the deck of a soaring flau. He can feel it rolling and swaying under him; when he looks at his feet or his wheels instead of the dim silhouette of the mountains, he feels mildly but immediately seasick.

To Bruno’s surprise, though, as they approach Radmer’s catapult mechanism at the center of the bridge, the Divide offers a wider view which includes several rows and banks of electric light on the near side, far below and behind them, like the view from an air car or a landing spaceship. He can even—to his much greater surprise—see boats down there, alive with tiny lights, slowly bobbing and swirling through what must be very large rapids.

“What industry is this?” he asks Radmer wonderingly. “Those lights, those boats! To pilot a ferry through such landscape as this must be a thrilling career.”

“And a short one,” Radmer says, “for the rapids are deadly and the loads very heavy.” Heedless of the half dozen Dolecti rolling out ahead of him, he stops and points beneath the railing on the side of the bridge. “Down there is the tin mine, from which Highrock got its start as a metalworking capital. There’s a gold mine further down, which you can just make out from here. Rare earths are mined upstream a ways. As you can see, there’s quite a lot of lithosphere laid bare in these walls. Easy pickings, prelayered by weight.”

Bruno can see no such thing in this darkness, and he says so.

Radmer grunts. “Well, I suppose you develop an eye for it after a while. If we had all night to linger here, you’d see all sorts of things in these walls, which have grown dusty with edible lichen, pale green and rusty orange. In the cities it’s considered a delicacy. Can you see it there in the spotlights? Those baskets are for lowering the harvest girls down along the face, looking for morsels choice enough for human consumption and scraping the rest into hog-slop buckets. They only do that in the daytime, though.”

“I wish I could see more,” Bruno offers politely.

“Yeah, well, in some ways the daytime view is actually worse, because the sunlight never penetrates more than two-thirds of the way down. But it washes out the artificial lighting, with the result that you can’t see anything down there at all.”

“Hmm.” This conversation is not without interest for Bruno, and in the past he has found reason to pause in places much scarier—much more tangibly deadly—than this. He was once trapped inside a Ring Collapsiter fragment, with only ion thrusters to turn his ship and keep it off the walls! But in the interests of moving along, he says nothing more, instead releasing the brake on his treader and rolling forward.

So when Radmer stops again at the center of the bridge, to speak to the two men fussing with the cranks and reels there, Bruno doesn’t know whether to see it as another interesting landmark or an unwelcome pause. Nor is he alone in this worry; the Dolceti—brave souls, to be sure—are aglow with anxiety, no doubt picturing themselves in a battle against gravity itself, a long fall during which their uncanny reflexes would avail them not at all.

“Let’s go, old man,” Zug mutters in a voice barely audible above the wind, whistling through the bridge cables.

“I hope you’re throwing something heavy,” Radmer says to the two men. “At someone truly deserving.”

They look up, and one of them says, “Oh. Hello, General.”

Radmer seems disappointed with that. “Is that all you have for me, Orange? No warm greetings? Aren’t you surprised to see me alive?”

“Should we be?” asks the other man, who must be Mika, the armorer. “All right, then, it’s good to see you. Alive. Can you give us a hand with this cocking latch?”

“Sure.” Radmer puts his kickstand down and dismounts. “What’s the payload? I’d dearly love to drop a greeting card right on the south pole. Just a note to say hello, right? But I’m afraid a show of defiance will tip our hand prematurely. Better to show our weakest face, until the last possible moment.”

“He’ll find us a bit sticky, if you’ll excuse my saying. This here’s eight tons of glue bombs, packed to scatter. That ought to hold the pass for a minute or two.”

Catching hold of a spring-loaded lever, Radmer laughs. “We can hope, yes. Are there oil traps as well, to tilt and slide your enemies into the Divide?”

“Course there are,” says Orange Mayhew.

“And other gifts,” says Mika, “fit for a Glimmer King. Where’re you heading?”

“Stormlands.”

“Ah. Bad luck, that.”

“Eh. No worse than usual. I saw Manassa from orbit—a hidden ruin, perfectly preserved right there in the center—so we’re hoping to collect a few surprises of our own.”

“Hmm,” says Orange Mayhew. “Well. Do me one favor, General: don’t get killed.”

“I’ll take that under advisement. You too, hey?”

But Orange just shrugs. “We’re human beings, sir, Mika here and myself. Living forever, well, it ain’t on our list of options.”

Chapter Twenty in which darkness proves an ally

On the other side of Tillspar, the highway is less icy but in generally poorer condition. As the road snakes down the eastern slope of the Sawtooth Mountains there are shelves and valleys with highways of their own—opportunities to turn north or south—but the riders follow the Junction Highway east and down. The air gets warmer, thicker, easier to breathe, and Bruno’s ears pop again and again as the pressure upon them slowly increases.

But every kilometer of road seems to be in greater disrepair than the one before it. As the treaders pass through East Black Forest, potholes give way to craters. And as the solar trees thin out to a simple pine forest, the craters become larger and more frequent. Ironically, just as the road is beginning to straighten and level out, it becomes impossible to follow anything like a straight-line course along it. A treader must needs zigzag between the holes at half speed.

“I’m surprised there’s any pavement here at all,” Radmer says when Bruno remarks on it.

“Nobody looks after this road,” Natan agrees. “It don’t go anywhere.”

At that Radmer muses, “It used to go straight to Crossroads, near the triple point where Imbria and Nubia and Viense come together. It was bigger than Timoch, which back then was a sheep-and-cow town. Manassa was the largest city in the hemisphere, a center of commerce easily rivaling Tosen and Bolo on the south coast. Keep in mind, there were a lot more people then.”

“I remember the Iridium Days well,” Bruno tells him, “if not happily. Lune was the rotting corpse of our Queendom; I couldn’t love it. Couldn’t bear it. I fled because my soul had died and my body refused to follow. But I do remember Manassa. The towers of wellglass all strung together with bridges, and every morning a silence field enforcing ten minutes of meditation… When I left they were in a blue period, with every surface glowing in the sun like crystalline bits of sky.”

“Well,” says Radmer, “after the Shattering, Manassa was gone and the Junction Highway led straight into permanent storm, and you had to take the long way around to get to Crossroads. The little towns along the way continued for quite some time afterwards, but one by one they sort of dried up and blew away. This road is two thousand years old, and it’s been, I’ll guess, almost three hundred years since it saw any attention. So like I say, the surprising thing is that there’s any road left.”

Bruno snorts at that. “When I was a boy we were still using Roman roads, older than this one and in far better condition.”

“The Catalan weather was kinder,” Radmer says. “For what it’s worth, there are diamond highways here on Lune that will last until the end of time. This pavement was a high-end temporary, never meant to last so long.”

Ahead of them, finally, the sky above another mountain range has begun to show signs of impending dawn. Even on Lune, the night cannot last forever. And the extra light is welcome, because the riders have finally abandoned the idea of avoiding the rough spots, and are now riding straight through them in a clattering mass. At first the clever six-wheeled suspension of the treaders is adequate to the task, but as the ruts deepen and their shapes become more complex, the wheels begin to exceed their vertical travel limits.

Soon, the heaving bodies of the treaders are pummeling their riders’ legs, and headlight beams are waving up and down so madly that the road might as well be illuminated by strobe lights. Progress slows yet again. They’re still going faster than they would on foot, but that margin is shrinking. Still, Bruno finds he can minimize the beating by crouching in his stirrups—essentially using his legs and back as an extension of the vehicle’s suspension system. And once that principle is established, there’s no reason not to straighten out his back, to stand tall for a better view, to gun the throttle and dance with the bumps.

To his surprise, he’s having a good time, and not feeling guilty about it. Not all the problems of this world are his fault, after all, and this ride is in the service of a noble cause, from which he may very well not return. And that, in truth, may be part of why he’s feeling good; the possibility of death hangs all around him. He nearly died back there in the pass; for Parma and that unlucky rider there was no “nearly” about it.

Bruno has been without useful work for so long that he hasn’t even bothered to count out the span. Thousands of years, certainly. But here he is again, doing something. And his time on this world, on any world, may at last be nearly over—his sins all called to account—so what’s the point in holding back? There’s nothing to keep him from riding to the limits of his ability, and even slightly beyond.

Eventually, he finds himself leading the pack, the wind whipping his hair out behind his helmet as the countryside slowly brightens ahead of him. He doesn’t notice that he’s left his escort behind, or else he notices but manages not to formulate any sort of conscious plan to correct it. But Captain Bordi’s voice calls ahead angrily, “Ako’i, back! Fall back! We’re supposed to be protecting you, damn it! Slow down!”

And when he does so, dropping back among the Dolceti, Bordi glares sternly at Natan and Zuq, telling them, “Stay within arm’s reach of him. Let nothing happen. You boys have taken the berry, taken the vow. You’re expendable; he isn’t.”

“Yes, sir!” the two of them call out ruefully, then cast baleful glares at Bruno.

But when Zuq finally speaks, all he says is, “Where in the hell did you learn to ride like that? You’ve never been on a treader, you said.”

And Bruno’s only answer is a muttered “Beginner’s luck.” Because there’s no point explaining to this boy that he’s ridden a scooter, ridden a car, ridden a skimmer and a broomstick and a horse. Not to mention a grappleship. He’s tried his hand at more different vehicles than Zuq will ever see or imagine; one more doesn’t tax him in the least. And he was never exactly a motor fanatic; he’s simply lived a long time.

Too, there’s the matter of being comfortable in one’s own skin. Bruno knows exactly what his body is and isn’t capable of. If he falls, he knows roughly what injuries he can survive. And he’s far more afraid of embarrassing himself than he is of getting killed, so he will drive this instrument, his body, exactly as he pleases. Indeed, for all their courage and reflexes the Dolceti are indifferent riders, and their pace begins to seem unnaturally slow.

Still, he grits his teeth and perseveres, and hour upon hour the Sawtooth Mountains shrink behind them, while the equally jagged Blood Mountains draw nearer up ahead. They pass a lake, which Natan calls The Lake of the Maidens. They pass a grove of peach pie trees, and another of peach cobblers. They pass five flocks of sheep, and once a shepherd looking down on them from a hilltop, the traditional crook-ended glowstaff in his hands.

Says Zuq, “The shepherds here have magic bottles, in which the milk never sours. Or so the story goes.”

And Bruno answers, “I believe it. Those bottles were common, once.”

“Really? And were there trolls in the hills back then, and mermaids in the sea?”

“There were. And stranger things.”

“‘For the insult, the trolls carried off Gyrelda, and made hard sport of her until Gyraldo stormed their bunker and won her freedom, and gave her a hundred paper dollars for her dowry.’ Is that true?”

Against the wind, Bruno laughs. “Perhaps. There were paper dollars then, inscribed with their value in gold. But the trolls I remember were all fine gentlemen.”

“Amazing. And did the animals really speak in human voices?”

“Ah. That’s probably not true, or at least I’ve no such recollection. But anything’s possible, eh?”

“Used to be,” says Zuq, agreeably. “Would you go back there if you could?”

“To the Iridium? Or the Queendom?”

“I dunno. You tell me.”

Bruno, his hair whipping in the breeze, grins over at the young Dolceti without humor. “My boy, I fear I’d go back to the Queendom if it cost the lives of millions. That’s precisely what we’re up against here: that yearning.”

As the morning slowly inches its way toward sunrise, Bruno can see that there’s something going on with the air behind the Blood Mountains’ forbidding peaks. Some sort of haze, some sort of cloud bank, darker than a mere rainstorm. In the flash of a lightning bolt he even fancies he can see dust and debris spinning around in there, in great, slow arcs and whorls.

“The Stormlands?” Bruno asks.

But Natan and Zuq can only shrug. “Maybe. We never seen it before, sir.”

Finally, the Dolceti out in front have lost track of the road altogether, and are bouncing through one dry wash after another. The wind, too, has taken on a foreboding character, slamming down from above without warning, the downdrafts bursting like town-sized water balloons. And the land has begun to slope upward again. Soon they’re riding up between hills, and then cliffs. Their progress slows yet again, and finally it’s Radmer, not Bordi, who calls a halt.

“Believe it or not, we’re early. I can see the gaps in these hills, but I can’t tell which one is our pass. I don’t think we’ll make any progress here until sunrise.”

“Four-hour halt,” Bordi calls out then, for sunrise is still five hours away. “Everybody eat and sleep.”

But Bruno is too keyed up to do either, and finds himself in a sort of mutual interrogation against Natan and Bordi, who are suddenly curious about his history, there beside a crackling firepit, with Radmer and a dozen Dolceti slumbering nearby.

“You’re a soldier,” they accuse.

Bruno laughs. “I? Taking orders? Marching in straight lines? I was a sort of knight at one point, but that’s a very different thing. Even at the worst of it, there wasn’t much fighting, and still less discipline.”

“A knight for whom?” Bordi presses. “Tara and Toji? Did you stand guard over this world while Radmer and his men crushed it?”

“Er, well, in a manner of speaking.”

“It’s hard to credit,” Natan says, “him being strong enough to carve a whole world. I’ve seen a lot of it; it’s a big place. So why does he need us if he’s such a power? Why can’t he just carve Astaroth right off the globe, and the Glimmer King with it?”

“Hmm. That’s a hard question to answer, lad. I suppose, when you get right down to it, we were only as powerful as our tools. These were exceedingly complex, and when too many of them broke down all at once, we were hard-pressed to repair them. Until that time we’d always seen civilization as an upward climb; it didn’t occur to us there was a down as well. Just as difficult and treacherous, but every step carried us farther from the stars, not closer.”

“Like the air foil,” Bordi suggests, drawing one and examining it. “They’re not making these anymore.”

“Indeed, yes. It’s a more wondrous thing than you probably suspect. But to build another one would take centuries. Whole nations would need to be conscripted, their entire economic surplus diverted, just to build the components of the tools which make this thing possible.”

“Maybe that’s what the Glimmer King is all about,” Natan says. “There’s all this work going on in the world, right? But it’s purposeless. Just shoes and plowshares, lightbulbs and treaders. Some little luxuries on the side. So a fellow comes along who thinks like you, right? But he’s not so agreeable. He sees all this capacity and he wants it, not for shoes and hats but for himself. There’s specific things he plans on building, but first he’s got to own those nations.”

“He means well,” Bruno says without thinking. “In his mind, he’s doing what’s necessary to achieve a kind of… paradise.”

Bordi turns and looks at him hard. “You said you didn’t know him.”

“I’ve seen his type,” Bruno answers.

“So you told the Furies. And would we like this paradise of his? Would we be happy there?”

“I, uh… I doubt it. Someone would be happy, but certainly not everyone. And even if you bought into the vision somehow, I suspect you’d balk at the cost of getting there. Notably, he isn’t offering you the choice.”

“No. He isn’t. So what’s he got in mind?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Bruno answers honestly. “We had a guy once who wanted to collapse the sun, as a means of opening a window into the future. Even ignoring the enormous loss of life, there was no particular evidence that seeing the future—the end of the future, specifically—would be in any way helpful. Might be a bad thing, who knows? But he didn’t offer a choice, either. These madmen never do.”

“Dulcet berries!” Zuq shouts, from a dozen meters away. “I’ve found dulcet berries. Two whole bushes of them!”

“Get some sleep,” Bordi tells him wearily.

“Never could sleep in the dawn hours,” Zuq answers. “Even when I’m tired, which right now I’m not. Can we do some blindsight, Captain?”

Bordi sighs. “It takes more than berries, boy. It takes courage. Takes equipment. Takes a cocktail of other drugs to get the training burned in properly.”

“But we have all that, sir.”

“Not all of it, no. Sit down and have a meal, why don’t you?”

But Zuq is not so easily deflected. “Never could eat in the dawning, either. Not till sunup, when my stomach comes alive. And sir, we don’t want to be lax on our training. Not at a time like this.”

Natan turns to Bordi. “You’ve got to admire his spunk. Most guys his age do the bare minimum, sweating it beforehand and moaning afterwards. If you could join the Dolceti without actually taking the berry, I swear, there’s a lot of people would do it.”

“So,” Bordi says, “in admiration of his fortitude, you’re volunteering to conduct?”

Natan thinks for a moment, then shrugs. “I don’t sleep in the dawning much, either.”

And Bruno, as curious as ever, chimes in with, “May I participate, Captain? I’ve heard a great deal about this ‘blindsight training,’ and it would be nice to know what’s involved. Firsthand, I mean.”

“I’ll save you the trouble,” Bordi says, unamused. “It’s pain and it’s terror. After their first experience, only one in a hundred ever go back for a second. It’s that bad. You can’t see, and you feel like you can’t breathe.”

“But you can,” Bruno says. “It’s physically safe.”

“Well. Yes, but—”

“The berries aren’t toxic? It won’t injure me to take them?”

“No, but—”

“Captain, I’ve been in some very tight corners in my time. I’m old enough to know my limits, and although you’ve seen me driving recklessly, I promise you I’ll not endanger myself again, so close to the target of our mission. I’ll do my duty, yes? But I would like to take this training. Indeed, it may help save my life when the moment of truth arrives.”

And to that Bordi has no response. But Bruno fancies he can see the man rethinking his opinions about this ancient beggar, Ako’i.

Says Natan, “The idea here is to bypass the conscious parts of your brain. There’s enough intelligence in the limbic to conduct a fight, and it’s fast, so that’s where we’re going this morning. Deep inside. And in the brain stem there’s more than just reflexes. It’s your bird brain, and it’s capable of behavior as complex as any bird, and as fast. That’s where your vision is going: to the birds. Take five berries—five, mind you!—and chew them thoroughly. When you got a good paste in your mouth, swallow it down.”

The berries are smaller than Bruno’s pinkie nail, and the same bright yellow as the Dolceti’s traveling cloaks, but other than that they look like blackberries, or little bunches of grapes. Their taste is overpoweringly sweet, so much so that like the drug, it’s probably a defense mechanism to keep animals from wanting to eat them. Their texture is surprisingly dry and leathery. The paste they form in Bruno’s mouth is like syrup cut with vinegar: dense and sticky, sweetly acrid and vaguely corrosive.

“How often have you done this?” Bruno asks Zuq when he’s choked them down per instruction.

“This’ll be my tenth time. It takes five before the Order will even admit you, and two more harder ones before they’ll give you rank and let you out on assignment. Dolceti are usually older than I am, because most of them can’t handle the berry more than a couple of times a year. Me, I’ve been trying to go every month.”

“So you’re tougher even than the average Dolceti?”

“Aw, it’s not my place to say that. But I’m definitely tougher than when I started.”

“Cut the chatter,” Natan instructs. “Take the yellow pill, and wash it down with a bit of water.”

The yellow pill is tasteless and perfectly spherical. Also very small, but its texture is gritty enough that it doesn’t go down easily.

“Now the white.”

Another sphere, larger and smoother.

“You’ll begin to lose your eyesight in about two minutes. After that, the fear will set in, and Ako’i, I want you to promise not to run off on me when it does. If you can’t handle it—and there’s no shame in it; most people can’t—then just curl up on the ground and we’ll look after you. Believe it or not, you’ll still get something out of the experience.

“The idea is to turn on your amygdala, your fear. We’ll create a behavior loop that bypasses the frontal lobe. Fear’s a tool; the more threatened your limbic feels, the more your behavior follows a preset routine, like a dance step. We’re just giving it a better routine than to run around screaming, see? A higher class of irrationality. There’s a time for being rational, but it’s not when a bullet’s flying at your head.”

“You people can dodge bullets?” Bruno asks, already feeling short of breath.

“That’s what blindsight training is,” Zuq answers, sounding surprised. “Didn’t you know? Sticks, rocks, arrows… The training bullets are a special round, oversized and not that fast, but yeah, they’ll be flying right at you. You’ll swat them aside or suffer the consequences.”

This idea fills Bruno with a gnawing dread, or perhaps the drugs are doing that, but either way he finds himself wishing, suddenly and fervently, that he had never pressed Bordi to allow this. What was he thinking? Even if these bullets can’t kill him—and it’s likely that they can’t, at least by ones and twos—he could be maimed. It might be weeks before he grows back all his missing parts!

“What does the blindness do?” he asks, for in spite of everything his curiosity is unimpaired.

“It isn’t blindness,” says Natan, “it’s blindsight. The berries are shutting down your visual cortex, but your optic nerve continues on down to the brain stem. Your inner bird can see just fine, and it’s his reflexes we want. He’s the one we’re training; the conscious ‘you’ is just a passenger.”

“A blind passenger. A terrified passenger.”

“Right. Mentally tied up, to keep you out of the bird’s way.”

Bruno’s vision is turning gray and fuzzy around the edges, which terrifies him. What if something goes wrong? What if it never comes back? To be immorbid and blind…

“People experience the training differently,” says Natan. “Some feel divided, like there are several distinct… things, entities, living inside their skulls. Some people just remember it as a panic. A blind panic, literally, where they can’t control theirselves. Some remember the whole thing as a set of conscious choices, even when they know it isn’t so. Some remember nothing at all, like their frontal lobe just goes to sleep.”

“Which am I?” Bruno asks, inanely, for how could Natan possibly know that?

Then, with alarming swiftness, his vision shrinks to a tunnel, then a drinking straw. He sees a burst of swirling patterns: lace, spirals, Cartesian grids mapped onto heaving topological surfaces. His life is far too long to flash before his eyes in a moment, but he gets pieces of it: a month of mathematical insights in a Girona tower, a decade as philander in Tamra’s court, an hour in battle armor under the red-hot surface of Mercury. Then nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

Bruno de Towaji, the one-time King of Sol, is blind.

“So fast! I wasn’t… ready…”

“I’m here with you,” Zuq says, from very nearby.

“Ah!” Bruno replies, fighting not to run. “Ah, God! Can you see anything?”

“No.”

“Try and relax,” says Natan, in a voice much calmer than Zuq’s. “Fear is a tool. Just a state of your brain, which we happen to find convenient. It’s nothing to do with you, the person. Just ride it.”

“In a moment… of weakness,” Bruno tries. “I’ve never… Rarely has such a moment of weakness been… I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I can’t… compose—”

“Enough talk, old man. Defend yourself!”

Bruno swats Natan’s hand aside. “Leave me. Alone.” He swats again, and again. Natan is trying to slap him! “Stop it. Stop! Leave me alone!”

And suddenly Bruno realizes what he’s doing: blocking slaps he cannot see. His arms aren’t moving of their own volition—he’s doing it himself, or feels that he is—but the sense, the feeling, the certainty that drives them… How does he know? How does he sense the blow coming?

Block. Block. Block block.

“Good,” Natan says. “Take hold of this.”

Bruno reaches out and accepts a wooden staff from Natan. There’s no fumbling in the motion, no guesswork. He even knows the shape before he has it in his hands. He’s aware, dimly, of movement all around him, the jiggling fire, the men rolling over in their sleep, the wind gusting straight down. But he cannot see them. This “blindsight” it isn’t like seeing at all. It isn’t like feeling or hearing. He simply knows.

How terrifying.

“Defend!” Natan commands, and Bruno is raising his staff. Crack! Crack! He blocks a pair of telegraphed blows, and then a shorter, swifter one delivered like a punch. CRACK!

“Attack!” says Natan, and Bruno is too afraid to disobey. Pulling left to avoid Zuq’s fragile human skull, he whirls the staff around and Strikes! Strikes! Strikes!

“Good,” says Natan, falling back to deliver fresh blows of his own.

“What about me?” Zuq asks, from a position Bruno doesn’t have to guess at. “This was supposed to be my—”

“Silence, maggot!” commands Natan. Bruno senses him whirling past in a blur of flesh and wood. Crack! Cracrack! The two of them come together and then separate, come together again.

“Ako’i! Attack! Both of you maggots, come, hit me. As hard as you can!”

Bruno does as he’s bid, and amazingly enough manages not to injure himself or Zuq in the process.

Still curious even in the face of this terrifying blindness, he asks, “Is this right? Is this the training?”

To which Natan just laughs. “Old man, this is the stretching exercise. The training doesn’t start for another fifteen minutes, when your drugs is more than a whisper in the blood. Now shut your hole and fight like a Dolcet Barney.”

“Ah,” Bruno gasps, and blocks a string of five blows.

Chapter Twenty-One in which the appetite of dragons is tested

The wind no longer whistles, but shrieks. It’s no longer cold, but deathly frigid. The rain no longer spatters, but fires down frozen from the heavens like a hail of meteorites. The ice melts swiftly, but so powerful is the wind that when a squall has passed, the sodden clay of the ground is dried in minutes, and peels away in crumbling sheets. As a result, the Blood Mountain Pass is a mess of sucking mud and stinging grit, with no sign of the pavement that once adorned it.

“I see the way now,” Radmer had said to the waking men. “If we hurry, we may yet miss this morning’s rain of stones.”

But had they? Would they? Overhead, the sky is a deep shade of gray-green that Bruno has never seen before. Still, despite the obscurants in his way—the dust and hail, the unruly clouds themselves—he can see structure in this unending storm. It’s a squashed toroid, a stretched donut, an elongated treader wheel nearly a hundred kilometers wide—nearly two hundred kilometers north to south—hovering flat against the landscape. And at half the footprint of the Imbrian Ocean, that’s a sizeable blemish for a world barely forty-four hundred kilometers around! On Earth, the equivalent storm would cover the whole of Greenland, or Europe from Gibraltar to Sardinia to the ports and vineyards of Bordeaux.

“When the pillar buckled and the neutronium plate slipped,” Radmer calls to him from two treaders over, “the gravity in this hex dropped by nine percent. It doesn’t sound like much, but it created… this. The low-pressure system might be circular if not for the Blood Mountains on the west and the Johnny Wang Uplift on the east, squeezing it, pushing it north and south in a big oval.”

While still piloting his treader, Radmer attempts to gesture his way through the half-shouted explanation. “Now that you’re here, you can see it: the air rushes in along the ground, and then suddenly it weighs less. More importantly, all the air above it weighs less, so there’s less pressure holding it down. It wells up. Then it hits the tropopause and flattens out, rolling back the way it came and then cooling and sinking, condensing out moisture. It’s a big, rolling ring, like a stationary smoke ring, except that Coriolis forces—weak as they are—pull it around into a cyclone. Add the turbulence and static of air passing through these mountains, and you’ve got a real mess!”

Indeed, the Blood Mountains are lower than the Sawtooth, but every bit as jagged. This world simply hasn’t had time to wear them down. And thanks to grit and sleet and the occasional uprooted shrub, Bruno can see the turbulence they create: crack-the-whip sheets and rolls of whirling air snapping off every peak, slicing through every valley. He hasn’t seen lightning yet, but the air is sharp with the tang of ozone.

“Are we going to survive this?” he asks casually, raising his voice above the howling wind.

“Most groups turn back around at this point,” Radmer answers. “Some vanish, or return at half-strength. Some probably find their way in and then die of starvation, rather than brave the tornadoes again. Only Zaleis the Wanderer has been to the eye of the storm and back, and lived to tell the tale. And he started with a group of five.”

Then, in a more personal tone, “How are you holding up?”

“Well enough,” Bruno says, not sure how else to answer.

“Sore?”

A barking half laugh. “No! Victims of explosive decompression are sore. I’m, well, there isn’t quite a word for it. The body hurts badly, but the real wounds are in the soul.”

“I could’ve told you not to try that,” Radmer chides. “Especially not before a big push like this. People end up in Special Care from that shit. Some of them permanently. You wouldn’t blow out an airlock and call it training. You wouldn’t smash your treader into a wall and call it training. If you survive, yes, you’ll have learned a thing or two. But there are better ways. All practice—especially repetitive—involves the brain stem. It has to!”

“He did all right,” Natan says, with a bit of warning in his tone. “I’ve seen better on the first try—I’ve seen a lot better—but with years of practice he could be one of us.”

Bruno has lived long enough to recognize this as high praise indeed. But he can also see the truth in Radmer’s criticism; blindsight is a shortcut, for people whose lives are miserably brief. The effect is real, yes: he can feel a new strength, a new swiftness in his limbs. They have a mind of their own now—quicker and surer than his own, yet subordinate to him. With practice, he could summon or dismiss it at will.

But with longer practice—decades, centuries—he could achieve a comparable grace without the… side effects. A little slower, a little smarter, a lot less damaged inside. “Disfigured” is the word that springs to mind, when his mind considers its own sorry state. The drugs have done something to him, something bad. Prolonged abuse of them would create… well, Dolceti. Violence addicts. Affable men and women with a zest for life, but a strangely sterile view of death and fear and pain, and no hope for a normal existence. In their own way, the Dolceti are as different from human beings as the Olders themselves. Bruno can appreciate that now. And fear it.

“He’ll be all right,” Natan says.

“Better than all right,” Zuq echoes.

But their definition of “all right” clearly differs from Bruno’s own. If he were going to live forever he’d probably feel a bit cheated, like he’d lost a finger and could never grow it back. As it is, with this sense of welcome doom hanging over him, he’ll simply accept the scar, and the costly insights that come with it.

To Radmer he says, “It’s no wonder you wanted Dolceti for my bodyguards. Who else would be brave and stupid enough to follow you into that?” He nods toward the pass ahead, where a trio of dust devils are whipping together into a single large vortex.

“Shit,” answers Radmer.

The vortex whirls straight down the pass, straight toward the riders.

“The dragon!” someone calls out, in mingled worry and glee. “The Shanru Dragon! See the mark she leaves! The dragon’s tail upon the ground!”

“Get down!” Radmer calls out. “Get off, get into the ditch!”

But the Dragon of Shanru is swift, and falls upon the treaders before all the riders have dismounted and fled. One Dolceti is pulled right off his mount, and another is whisked from the ground, and both are flung high into the air, twirling and tumbling, and then dashed against the cliff wall high above. Their bodies fall, limp and lifeless, against the cliff’s sharp crags.

Bruno, who reached the ditch in time, feels the tornado pass right over him with no worse effect than a sandblasting, a slam against the ground, a breathless moment of popping ears and eyeballs bulging against tightly closed lids. The Dragon’s shriek and chuff are deafening, and then they’re gone, and for his fallen comrades Bruno momentarily feels only a deep contempt. Because they brought it on themselves. Because they stopped to look at the vortex bearing down on them, when they should have dropped and crawled.

“Fools,” he mutters under his breath. And only then thinks to feel ashamed.

Soon there is lightning crashing all around, and except for the occasional errant gust, the shrieking wind is firmly at the riders’ backs. The Dolceti are more careful on the Dragon’s second visit, suffering no additional casualties, but after the roadway’s third scouring Radmer proclaims, in a voice barely audible above the storm, “These twisters are dropping down into the pass from above! Bigger every time! Our luck won’t hold; we’ve got to seek higher ground!”

“The treaders won’t climb these walls!” Bordi says. “Too steep, too pointy!”

“I know; we’ll have to leave them behind!”

“Are you insane?” someone asks. But Radmer just looks around at the Dolceti, his expression answering the question for him: No, just desperate.

“This moment had to come! Sooner or later, we’ll have to press forward on foot. The question is, how many people do you want to lose before we try it? Load up your packs, everyone! Food, water, bivvies, nothing else. Oh, and weapons!”

Well, obviously, Bruno mutters, in a voice even he cannot hear.

In another three minutes they’re all scaling the canyon wall, following Radmer single-file along the uphill slope of jagged basalt layers, like arrowheads sprouting from spearheads sprouting from swords and fallen, leaf-shaped monoliths. The points and edges have been sandblasted dull—no one seems in danger of cutting off a hand or foot—but with even a minor fall the jags are sufficient to snap a human spine, to stave in a skull, to shatter a leg and leave its owner stranded. There could be little doubt that the group would press forward, leaving any such unfortunates to their fate. Except for Bruno and Radmer, of course; they would be rescued at almost any cost. But that was hardly fair, for they were as close to unbreakable as a human body could be made.

There had, of course, been even ruggeder body forms out in the colonies—trolls and whatnot, shot through with diamond—but they had sacrificed their softness, their sensitivity, their very humanity. And although many such creatures had returned from the stars in the gray days after the Queendom, none had survived even into the Iridium recovery that preceded the Shattering. One by one they’d succumbed to disease, to old age, to the gloom of loneliness, and their genomes had rarely bred true. Even the Olders bore mortal children, yes? When they bore children at all. In the colonies, and indeed in the Queendom itself, the art of reproduction had decoupled itself from any natural biology. And it suffered grievously, when those technical crutches were kicked away.

Still, nature is clever where the propagation of species is concerned, and a love of breeding can welcome many a wayward subspecies back into the gene pool. Whether by chance or by design, these “humans” of Lune are a clever synthesis of the many human-derived forms Bruno recalls from those days. And they are human, far more than they’re centaur or angel or mole. As such they’re frail, and he fears this terrible country may be too much for them.

For that matter, it may be too much for Olders, else Manassa would be more than a half-believed legend. Had only one person truly made it there and back in one piece?

A message crawls back along the line, shouted from man to man over the howling of restless atmosphere: “We don’t dare climb to the top of the ridge. The winds are fiercer up there, and we’d be a prime target for lightning. We’ll proceed about two-thirds of the way up the canyon. Move cautiously. Step on the big rocks, not the small ones; they’re more stable.”

Bruno sends his own question up the line: “How much farther do we have to go?”

A minute later, the reply comes back: “Two full kilometers to climb, across ten horizontal. After that it’s downhill into Shanru Basin. But the winds will keep getting worse until we cross the eyewall, twenty kilometers from here!”

Ah. Well, here’s another great surprise, another place Bruno never imagined ending up. The benefit of a long life, yes: a large number of very large surprises. Moving glove-over-glove and boot-over-boot like this, across jagged, icy rocks, they’ll be lucky to manage a kilometer an hour. And what sort of shape will they be in when they finally burst through into clear air? What if they have to fight? What if they have to think?

He supposes at first that the final hours will be the hardest, but then he begins to suspect that nothing could be worse than the battering they’re receiving right now. The wind here carries not only dust and grit, but occasional bursts of sharp gravel as well. Dragon or no, Bruno is nearly ripped from the rock face many times by errant gusts. Dragon pups? At other times he’s slammed against it, until his skin is raw and his bones are aching inside their carbon-brickmail sheaths. His arm screams where the robot’s sword cut it; it has healed, yes, but it will never be the same.

But the trudge goes on and on and on some more. The sun must be well up into the sky by now, but here beneath the roiling thunderheads it’s dark as dawn and gray as a Fatalist ghoul. No more messages are passed. Even thoughts are drowned out by this unending noise.

When they reach a flat, minimally sheltered area and the line around him begins to break up, Bruno at first worries that they’re going to lose somebody. Single file, people! he thinks at them furiously. But then, as the Dolceti get their bivvy rolls out, he understands: they’re stopping to rest. Not to eat, certainly not to cook, but to huddle together in a miserable mass. One guard manages to lose his bivvy into the wind, and ends up curled in with Mathy, the surviving Mission Mother.

Bruno manages to hang on to his own, although its tent top rips as he’s climbing in, and finally tears away altogether. It scarcely matters; the freezing rain finds its way in horizontally under the rock shelf, under the tents, and soaks all the bags anyway. Fortunately, the material they’re made from seems to retain its heat even when wet. Resting here seems a laughable concept, like falling asleep in a barrel rolling down a jagged slope, but incredibly, Bruno remembers nothing after that frazzled thought.

Nothing, that is, until the firm hand of Radmer shakes him awake. His eyelashes are partially frozen together, but he forces them apart and sits up. Radmer—looking miserable as a scarecrow, with icicles hanging from the chin strap of his helmet—says something to him which he can’t make out. He answers back with something even less coherent. But all around him the Dolceti are packing away their bivvies, and he must do likewise. To stay here would mean certain death.

Soon they’re on the move again, and Bruno can’t guess what time of day it is, or how far they’ve come, or how much longer they have to go. Indeed, his mind can scarcely grasp these concepts at all; the world is reduced to wind and pain, to slow, careful movement between the rocks. When he closes his eyes—and he closes them often now, against the frigid sting of wind and sleet—he still sees rocks. These are his thoughts: rocks, and more rocks, and the occasional step or grasp to carry him from one to the next. Time has no meaning at all.

Still, there does come a point where he notices they’re going downhill. This by itself is not unusual, for the pass snakes up and down many times as it rises through the mountains. But the trend is down now. They’ve passed the summit, and are on their way down into the Shanru Basin. They have reached the halfway mark. Which only means that the worst is still to come.

Of the terrible hours after that, Bruno later remembers nothing at all. His first clear memory is of the eyewall, which resembles a tornado, except that it’s so large—fifteen kilometers large!—that it appears flat, like a genuine wall. It’s so tall that it seems to have no structure at all, no top, no twist or curl. It’s just a straight, opaque, heaving wall of flying debris, from dust and fines to sharp rocks the size of his head. Blowing up, more than laterally. Is this the main source of the region’s gravel rains?

He notices another thing as well; the wind has changed somewhere along the way. No longer frigid and damp, it’s now warm and very dry. He can no longer blink his eyes; they’ve dried open in a crust of mucus. When did that happen? In fact, the air grows warmer with every step. The eyewall itself must be as dry and hot as an oven; he can feel the heat radiating off it. From friction? From the sudden compression of unwilling air against the storm’s unyielding center? Certainly, the sound of it is louder than anything Bruno has ever experienced. Like an ongoing explosion, the eyewall is a vertical slice of hell. How deep can it be? How long can a human survive all this?

“Are we going through there?” he shouts to no one. And of course they are. Where else is there? Even staggering like drunks, what other chance or choice have they got?

Blast.

And somehow they do get through; Bruno will later remember the experience like a nightmare: in fragments. Smashed against a rock, then clinging desperately to it as he’s lifted off his feet! Smashed against the ground, then scrabbling for something, anything, to grab on to as the vast suction takes hold of him. A dizzy airborne moment and then, miraculously, a hard landing on his knees. That’s all. He later suspects that he managed to close his eyes, and in fact had them closed the whole time, for the memories are visceral rather than visual.

In any case he emerges onto a plain of sand, beneath a sky so blue and bright it seems to burn his optic nerves. The sun hangs over the eyewall’s far side, illuminating the storm’s interior like a vast, spinning paper lantern.

He staggers forward, becomes aware of a figure ahead of him, a figure behind. He wants to rest, to drink a sip of water and then collapse into a dreamless coma. He doesn’t care if he ever awakes. But there’s brick-sized debris raining down all around him, so he staggers on a little farther, a little farther. The bedrock beneath his tattered boots gives way to dirt, and then to sand that feels as soft and cool as a wellstone bed.

Finally he comes to a gathering place, a hollow in the sand where raggedy human beings have accumulated. He throws himself down among them and takes that longed-for sip of water. Another person plops down beside him, and then another. And there must be some part of his brain that remembers thought, remembers mathematics, for he takes in the scene with a glance and says to himself, “Our twenty Dolceti are down to just ten. We’ve lost six more along the way.”

It’s his last thought for a long, long time.

Chapter Twenty-Two in which a crown of empire is retrieved

Looking over Bruno and the sleeping Dolceti, a newly awakened Radmer feels—if grimly—the same vindication he did upon setting his boots on the beaches of Varna, after a fifty-hour tumble through cold vacuum. Crazy idea, yes, but here they are. Ten bodies poorer than they began, but still operational.

And there, in the distance, nestled among dunes as high as ten semaphore towers, lie the ruins of Manassa. He sees stone and brick walls jutting up, gray and black and ocher against the sand. More important, he sees the mirror-black sheen of inactive wellstone, alive with glints of green and purple and tarnished silver. It’s been a long time since he’s seen so much in one place, and it’s a good sign indeed; this deadly journey has not been in vain.

The dunes themselves are light brown in color, with patches of gray-black and khaki, and long, strange smudges of darker brown. They look like nothing so much as a pair of desert camouflage trousers out of some Old Modern war drama. The top of the dune field makes a clean line against the sky, not sinusoidal but irregular, ripply, dotted with shallow crests and peaks. It divides the world in two: brown underneath and achingly blue above.

By contrast, the first ridgeline of the Blood Mountains is jagged and chaotic with trees, with rocks, with a variety of grays and browns, dark greens and light greens. Behind that sits the eyewall, which reaches away to the north and south, wrapping around the Shanru Basin. A weak tornado, fifteen kilometers wide.

To the west, the ragged line of the Johnny Wang Uplift is lost in blue-white haze, with the eyewall behind it and evil-looking clouds boiling over the top, racing hard to the north. The ground between here and the Uplift is incredibly flat, broken only by the dune field itself.

Ah, my precious Lune, Radmer frets. He hasn’t seen this place since the Shattering, when the ground fell two hundred meters and the city burst like a melon. Almost no one got out alive. It looks now like a cork jammed too deep in its bottle and then left too long on the shelf, so that the resulting hollow has filled with dust. Disrupting the clean lines of his planette, his would-be masterpiece. If he’d had more time to track down and melt out seismic hotspots, that terrible day might never have come. He’d never had it in him to save the Queendom, but the Iridium Days, at least, might still be going strong if he’d managed the last years of Luna with greater finesse. Tamra had forbidden him from completing the crustal stabilization, yes, but that simply told him he should have begun it earlier. Somehow. He should have paid more attention to the news; he should have anticipated the need.

Or, alternatively, he could have mustered the resources of the post-Queendom era. With sufficient digging—and he knew where to dig—the worst of the pressure could still have been relieved, gradually and intentionally. Not all in one shot. The Shattering was his fault if it was anyone’s. Still, his punishment is fitting: to dwell forever in the ruins. Such is the fate of an immorbid people, as Rodenbeck had warned.

But Radmer learned long ago not to mope. It doesn’t help anything. He turns his mind instead to practical concerns: a fire, upon which a decent breakfast might finally be cooked. He begins gathering up bits of desert driftwood, strangely light and hard in his hands.

At the edges of the dune field, there are dead and dying trees. Also a few living ones that look recently half-buried, and some dead-and-mostly-buried ones looking as though the sand moved forward and swallowed them a long time ago. Here and there, thick roots and branches jut out of the sand like bones, with a solid, shiny feel that suggests they’re already partially fossilized. How long would it take to petrify wood in sands like these?

But the stuff burns well enough when he lays it in a pit, so he unfolds the little titanium grate he’s been carrying all these days, and places some hard biscuits and olives and fatbeans in a tray of water to soften them up for grilling.

Soon the smells of food are waking up the others, who rub their eyes, make faces at the scum and grit in their mouths.

“Am I dead?” the young Dolceti, Zuq, asks hopefully. He looks like a man badly hung over and ready to swear off the grape forever. His skin has gone purple-white, but that at least is a reaction to the brightness here; his body is attempting to reflect unwanted heat and UV.

“Not yet, I’m afraid. But with one of my breakfasts, you may be in luck. How’s your condition?”

“Not good,” Zuq answers, showing off a broken wrist.

And he’s not alone; of the ten Dolceti who’ve made it this far, nine are sporting some sort of major sprain or fracture. Splinting these becomes the first task of this day, which is already into late afternoon and will see the sun set in another twelve hours.

“Remember the war,” Radmer tells them solemnly, as Bruno de Towaji stirs, shakes the sand out of his hair, and finally rises. “Injured or not, you’re here to fight. You’re here to protect this man, Ako’i, while he rummages through yonder ruins.”

“We know our jobs,” Bordi answers solemnly. “We don’t need you to tell us.”

“Fair enough. But you do need breakfast.”

He dishes it hot into their waiting bowls, and for those who’ve lost their bowls along the way he plops it, steaming, into their bare hands. If it burns them, they don’t acknowledge it, but rather wolf it down, barely pausing to chew.

“I’ve been here before,” Bruno says while the others eat. His eyes are on the distant wellstone jutting up from the sand.

“In the Iridium Days?” Zuq asks, sounding, as always, like he just barely believes it.

Bruno snorts. “They weren’t called that until they were nearly over, lad. We had no name for that bitter time, when the Earth lay dying, chewed outward from its core by fragments of the murdered Nescog. Still, ‘iridium’ is a clever pun; someone back then had an acid sense of humor.”

“Because it sounds like Eridani?” Radmer asks.

Bruno coughs out a bitter laugh. “Not at all, lad. Think back to your chemistry lessons; think of a periodic table. Iridium is a member of the precious metals group, one step down from platinum and two down from gold. But it’s less shiny than either, and was never a favorite in coins or jewelry. In a value-of-metal sense, the phrase ‘Iridium Days’ falls somewhere between ‘Golden Age’ and ‘Iron Age.’ It’s a dark subtle irony for an era of decline.”

“Well,” says Zuq, “at least they kept a sense of humor.”

Bruno smiles down at the boy, who still looks to his eyes like an overgrown toddler. Not only is he short, but like all the “humans” he’s got that oversized coconut, those big questioning eyes. “You mightn’t say that if you were there.”

“You did a lot of fighting?”

“Indeed, though not against an enemy you’d recognize. Oh, there were shooting wars here and there, but for the most part we had shamed ourselves into a kind of sorry truce. Even Doxar Bagelwipe was appalled at the scale of destruction. ‘So fragile after all,’ he said on his deathbed. The nerve!”

“So what did you fight?”

Bruno waves a hand. “Oh, you know. Gravity. Entropy. I spent a decade as a common laborer in the Bag Corps, trying to rescue as much mass as possible for the neutronium presses. Trying to turn the Earth into a constellation of planettes, so her people might have somewhere to flee to, even if they lacked the means. But they did lack the means, and so did we. Only two planettes were built down there in the gravity well, before the Earth collapsed into rainbows. I have no idea what’s become of them since. Uninhabited, presumably, or your people would know of them. Have you heard of a world called Ramadan? Or another called Open Hand?”

“I haven’t,” admits Zuq. Other voices mutter their agreement.

Bruno sighs. “No, I thought not. Alas. Before that I was involved in a project to revive select portions of the Nescog. Right here in Manassa, for almost a year. Someone had found an old fax machine, complete with network gates, and we snatched it from the hospital system and were trying to contact the last few nodes, before they went down. With that, you see, we could yank people right off the dying planets! But the tide was against us, all efforts in vain. Were there people who considered the situation normal? Even glorious? I never met them. For those who remembered the Queendom, its aftermath was a time of great sadness.”

“It got better later,” Radmer tells them both, as if apologizing. But Bruno is mostly right; the Iridium Days were never as roaring as the legends that adhered to them afterward. But neither, in his opinion, was the Queendom itself. He’d fought against it, been exiled from it, crawled back to it in defeat, and finally, toward the end, joined its upper echelons—a rich man with heady connections. He knew it better than Bruno did; knew it from up and down, from inside and out. And the simple fact was, the Tara and Toji of Luner mythology, with their Sphere Palace and their Great Bronze Navy and their “only as strong as the weakest among us,” were creatures out of fairy tale. He’d long ago stopped trying to reconcile them to any literal history.

But Bruno surprises him by saying, “Nothing lasts forever, my friend. Not even the bad.”

And what can Radmer say to that, who has seen his share of bad, and even a goodly slice of forever?

After breakfast, he leads Bruno up into the dune field for a closer look, taking Deceant Natan—the only uninjured Dolceti—along as bodyguard. Radmer doesn’t expect trouble, but he’s always prepared for it.

At the base of the hills, the dirt looks almost exactly like beach sand: a mix of white and brown and black grains, very small, interspersed with sharp bits of unweathered gravel that can’t have been here very long. And like an undisturbed beach or riverbed, the ground is covered with a ripply pattern of footprint-sized dunes. When he steps in the trough of one, he finds it squashing underfoot like a sponge. When he steps on the crest, it supports his weight for a moment and then slowly undergoes a kind of staged collapse. Squish squish crunch. It’s like this at every step, and it will take a lot of steps to carry them up to those ruins.

With a terraformer’s eye, he takes in the view ahead, admiring the way the sweep of the mountains has conspired with the swirl of the storm to gather so much dust in this quiet corner. The dune field is larger than the city it swallowed. In fact, Radmer can see now that the city must extend beyond the eastern side of the eyewall, into even greater ruin.

Still, surprisingly, the northeast faces of many dunes are lined with grass and other plants, particularly at the base, or the seam between dunes, and it strikes him suddenly that this is not so much a desert as a battleground, between the forces that build and move the dunes, and the forces that seek to smother them with plant life. It’s the terraforming drama itself, writ small.

Nor is this place particularly dry. Indeed, emerging from the base of a high dune, a little stream flows in bursts, with minor flash floods of water surging every twenty seconds or so. Gloo-OOP! Gloo-OOP! like a kind of geological clock, ticking away the empty millennia. Bruno pauses here, admiring.

“I should like to study this regularity,” he says, sounding wistful. “How do deep sand and shallow water conspire in this way? Tick, tock!”

But Radmer doesn’t have to remind him there’s a war on, with millions of lives hanging in the balance. Bruno watches four complete cycles, and then he’s off toward Manassa again, without prompting. It’s not an easy walk; after a while, the crumbly yielding softness of the sand fatigues the calf muscles, the ankles, the tendons along the top of the foot. Maybe a camel would feel at home on a surface like this, but few other creatures are adapted for it; Radmer is keenly aware that he’s a primate of seashore and savannah and forest. He can climb a rock or a tree without difficulty, but his evolution doesn’t know this place.

Still, they find their way. The crests of the dunes are almost like roads, extending for winding kilometers. On either side the dunes drop away into hollows a hundred meters deep. On the face of a dune, the undisturbed ground is a tiger-stripe pattern of brown and black, or beige and dark gray. The lighter sand seems to accumulate in the hollows, with the darker sand following along the ridgelines.

“Something to do with grain sizes?” he asks Bruno.

But the older man just shrugs. “A natural sorting mechanism, clearly. Weight, temperature, the stickiness of the grains… You’re the planet builder, I’m afraid. I can only guess.”

Anyway, for whatever reason, the vegetation and the lighter sand seem to occur mainly in the same places—streaks of white and green among the brown. Even though it’s technically winter, the long day has heated up the dark sand, which shimmers with mirages. Radmer is already thirsty again, and from the road-crest of a dune those cool colors beckon. And the roads don’t lead the right direction anyway; from here, straight on is straight down! But walking down the steep hillside is almost impossible; it invites one to run. Soon the three men are descending in great walloping giant’s steps, with the sand squeaking and groaning wherever their feet touch down. It’s hilarious and a little bit frightening, because the dune collapses with every step, and it seems to Radmer that the whole thing could easily bury them without a hiccup if they stumble. So they don’t.

The pale sand at the bottom of the ditch is very firm when his foot comes down straight on top of it. A sideways kick loosens it, though, revealing softer sand beneath. It appears, actually, to be a semisolid crust of larger particles sitting on top of a fluid of smaller ones. The trough is full of dried, dead vegetation, with mounds of light brown sand surrounding it.

He’s got to retract his thoughts about the lifelessness here, though, for on closer inspection he sees that the dunes are crisscrossed with little tracks. The shapes and even sizes of the footprints have been lost—blurred out by the shifting sand—and there’s no other clue to their identity. Ironically, the plants here in the trough look edible and even succulent: desert species of pea and rice and pepper, perfectly adapted to sucking moisture out of this environment.

He hasn’t seen a termite mound anywhere, but here in the trough he does see a few individual blue-on-clear specimens, carrying not only seeds and wood fragments but also the body of some larger insect he’s not sure he recognizes. Or perhaps it’s a little machine, not truly organic at all, and the termites will go hungry tonight. In any case it’s balanced along three blue-and-clear backs, and moving steadily toward whatever home the termites have here.

“Industrious and hungry,” says Bruno, looking down at the marching line, and Radmer can see how strange these engineered creatures must seem to him, who grew up on an Earth still mostly natural.

“Food for something else,” he counters, for ultimately that’s the only purpose any animal serves in this ecology. Or any ecology.

One set of animal tracks, clearly left by a kangaroo rat, consists of paired footprints, very small, with a linear drag mark between, as from a little tail. The footprints terminate in a fist-sized mound of undisturbed sand, and Conrad supposes the thing has buried itself there to wait out the day’s rising heat. In summer this place must be an oven! But Radmer can see, again with his terraformer’s eye—how a big, hungry creature like himself could make his living out here. Reaching an arm into the sand to pull out mice and lizards, garnishing them with desert rice and desert peas and cooking them over half-fossilized driftwood, with the woody, nutty taste of termites for dessert… The eye of the Stormlands would be hard-pressed to support a large population—as the empty city of Manassa can attest!—but there’s enough energy here to sustain a small band of frugal hermits.

Would it make them hard? Vicious?

“Keep your eyes open,” he suggests to Natan, quite unnecessarily since the Dolceti have no other job. “This place isn’t exactly lifeless.”

“If there’s boogeymen,” Natan agrees cheerfully, “I’ll hold ’em off.”

Radmer isn’t kidding, but neither is Natan, so he lets it go.

“There’s good clean air here,” Natan adds approvingly. “Nice for my allergies. Don’t worry yourself, General.”

Surprisingly, an hour later they’re only about halfway to the area Radmer has identified as the “top” of the dune field. If there are more and higher peaks behind those, he doesn’t want to know about it! But it seems they have arrived at the outskirts of Manassa; a corner of wellstone juts up half a meter from the sand.

“Declarant,” Radmer says to Bruno, pointing out the anomaly.

“Ah,” says the former king, rubbing his hands together. “Well, well. What have we here?” He kneels next to the object and brushes some of the sand away from it. “It’s dead, for starters, but so are a lot of things. Wake up, you!” And when that doesn’t work, he taps it forcefully, several times. “Hello? Activate!” This, at least, produces a brief flicker of color.

Bruno looks back at Radmer. “You used to know these things, Architect. Have you any ideas? It’s getting plenty of sunlight, so it should—”

“This piece is getting plenty of sunlight,” Radmer says, and for a moment he sounds like Conrad Mursk, even to himself.

“Ah!” Bruno agrees, liking that answer quite a lot. “This piece is getting plenty of sunlight, but we have no way of knowing how far down the structure extends. It’s browning out! This little sliver may be attempting to power an entire building, yes? Or else it really is dead, but let’s start with what we know. Natan, will you break off a piece for me? This way, if you please, not that way.”

But it proves more difficult than he’d expected; against even dead wellstone, mere human strength is rather slight. But with swords and feet and a great deal of grunting and heaving, the three men manage to break off a shard that fits neatly into Bruno’s hand, with edges dull enough that Radmer doesn’t fear he’ll cut himself.

But still, the fragment refuses to respond with anything more than flickers of green and a faint, faint crackling noise. Finally, in exasperation Bruno says, “Listen, you, this is a Royal Override. Shut down all resident programs and boot up in command line mode.”

Strangely enough, that works. Yellow letters and numerals appear on the flat surface, and in another moment Bruno is tapping the shard with three fingers in rapid sequence, keying in a set of basic configuration commands. The thing, already shiny rainbow-black in his hands, turns the color of a solar tree: superabsorber black. Then it begins to change in more sophisticated ways; colors shoot along its length as it reconfigures itself, layer by nanoscopic layer.

“God’s eyes!” Natan curses, watching the fragment flicker and change. “I never quite believed in sorcerers!”

Bruno looks up in annoyance. “Eh? Is it sorcery to spill ink on a page? To rot an apple? To stand in the sun and turn your ‘human’ skin as white as milk? No? Then I’m no sorcerer, Deceant. This object is a tool, like a special sort of window glass. Nothing more.”

“So you say,” Natan mutters, looking as though he’d prefer to take a step or two backward. But this Older is his responsibility, through death or worse. He stands his ground. “But in the stories, it’s only Tara and Toji who can command the stones. ‘Roylovride,’ yeah, that’s the magic word.”

Bruno turns away in weary disappointment. “Believe what you like. I don’t suppose it matters.” To the fragment in his hand he says, “Run standard sensor package. Run any sensor package. Run sensor diagnostic.” Then, when these fail to work, he casts an annoyed look at Radmer and says, “Do you know anything about sensor design?”

And although Conrad Mursk did time in two different navies, in deep-space and deep-solar atmospheres—places where wellstone sensors were the difference between life and death—it never really rubbed off on him. He was remarkably bad at a remarkable number of things, which in the end is why he’s ended up here, why the world is the way it is.

“No,” says Radmer. “I wish I did.”

“Hmm. Well.” Bruno plops his ass down in the sand and peers at the fragment for several long minutes. “There’s information buried inside you,” he mutters to it at one point. “Libraries of it. You know things; you just don’t know you know them.”

He sits there, fumbling and muttering, for what seems like a long time. Then, finally, perhaps an hour after sitting down, he rises again and brushes the dust off himself.

“Have you got it working?” Radmer asks, trying not to sound weary or ungrateful.

“Not properly, no,” Bruno answers with obvious irritation. “I’m trying to map the city by composition, and it’s just not working. But I’ve located something that might make the job easier.”

“Yes? What’s that?”

“A working fax machine,” Bruno says, as though it isn’t good news at all.

As it turns out, the fax is located a kilometer and a half deeper into the dune field, where the free flow of sand is restricted by the presence of wellstone walls, running deep. And even to Radmer himself, it really does begin to seem that Bruno is a kind of sorcerer, for though he’s complained about the crude sketchplate in his hands—it isn’t working properly, it isn’t suitable, its library has been corrupted—he’s able to use it, somehow, to communicate with the dead wellstone all around him. Conrad Mursk had been an expert programmer in his day, and his particular specialty was in speaking to buildings, or pieces of buildings. But Conrad had merely been determined and lucky, which was not at all the same thing as being brilliant.

Now, Bruno walks out ahead of Radmer and Natan, and the dead wellstone in his wake turns to silver and gold, to impervium and marble and mother-of-pearl. There’s no real rhyme or reason to it, no master plan, no memory of how the city once looked. The King of Sol is just fooling around, putting the stuff through its paces, like a musician picking up a long-forgotten instrument. In truth the effect is kind of gaudy, kind of ugly. But it makes a world of difference in the appearance of the desert: no longer a ruin, no longer a dead city filled with sand, but a sleeping one, carefully preserved for later use.

The first problem comes when the fax machine turns out to be buried deep in the sand. When the men arrive at the designated spot, there isn’t even a building. There are wall fragments and even a bit of intact rooftop nearby, but the magic spot itself is just a basin of sand, featureless and apparently empty.

“Blast,” Bruno says, surveying the scene unhappily. But he isn’t daunted for long; within another minute he’s calling out instructions to the surrounding wellstone, forging connections between the intact pieces of building and the intact pieces of street far below. Soon the fragments are coming alive with circuit traces, white and gold and silver on black, and he’s murmuring to them, gesturing, and finally raising his beseeching arms into the air, more like a prophet or a druid than any conventional sort of scientist.

And the sand responds.

At first there’s just a hissing sound, and then a slight rumble underfoot, barely noticeable. Then Conrad’s hairs suddenly stand on end, his pistol and blitterstick rattle in their holsters, and there is a tangible jerk in the ground beneath his feet. Against the sides of the wellstone ruins, the sand begins flowing like water. Out, away, unburying this place. And in another few seconds these trickles are entraining more sand around them, becoming rivulets, streams, rapids. Radmer exchanges a glance with Natan, and the two of them step back, and back, and back some more. If Bruno needs protection in this place, it’s not a sort that they can provide. Soon, the dust is flying in geysers and there’s an excavation happening in real time, right before their eyes. The hole is rectangular, at least to the extent that the collapsing sand permits, and it’s three meters deep, then five, then ten. Radmer and Natan retreat farther. Then the hole widens, and they have to retreat some more. Within minutes, the top of a building is exposed. Then the whole top story, with the sand flowing away in rivers, crawling to higher ground and spilling down out of sight, into hollows somewhere, burying mice and lizards and desert peas.

Then, all at once, the sound and the movement stop. The sand neither rises nor falls. It doesn’t trickle back into the hole, and Radmer’s hair does not lie flat against his scalp. There is some sorcery at work here, still.

“It’s down there,” Bruno says, pointing quite unnecessarily into the pit. As if they could miss what happened there. As if they could be looking at anything else. The building fades from mirror-black to bronze, and Bruno says to it, in a somewhat louder voice, “Glass ceiling. Glass windows. Door.”

A double line of round portholes appears in the bronze, one of them surrounded by a rectangular seam, which parts from the material around it and swings inward on imaginary hinges. Bruno climbs down into the hole on sure, steady feet, as though he does this all the time. He follows the carpet of rigid sand right into the doorway itself, pausing at the threshold to look over his shoulder at Natan and Radmer. “Are you coming?” It’s very nearly a command.

Natan is looking frankly scared by all this, and Radmer can hardly blame him. He hasn’t seen a sight like this in thousands of years, or maybe ever. But he murmurs, “It’s all right. We’re in good hands.”

And Natan replies, “I’d fling myself into the great beyond for this man, too, in a sphere of brass or not. Suddenly I feel sorry for the Glimmer King. Isn’t that a funny thing?”

“Aye,” Radmer can only agree. And with that, they follow the ancient scarecrow of a man inside the ancient building.

The interior is surprisingly well lit. It’s an office of some sort, and the surfaces are immaculate—walls and floors and countertops, tables, the arms and seats and backs of wellstone chairs, supported by spindly structures that look, even to Conrad’s eye, as though they should have collapsed at the first puff of wind. The fax machine—a sight Radmer hasn’t seen since the Shattering, or nearly, stands against a far wall. Bruno walks right up to it as though he owns the place.

“Buffer status.”

And then, when that doesn’t work, “Royal Override. Reset all functions to factory nominal. Report the status of mass buffers. Report the status of memory buffers. Perform a full diagnostic, and stand by.”

The foggy, fractal surface of the print plate flickers for a moment, and then the walls around it come alive with diagrams, with scrolling lists of words and numbers, with a holographic table of the elements, annotated with a bar graph showing how much of each element is present in the machine at this particular time. It isn’t much.

“Fax,” Bruno says to it, “how are you feeling?”

“Very well, Your Majesty. It’s good to be functional again, for the first time in nineteen years.”

“Nineteen? Not two thousand?”

“I’m not sure why I said that, Sire. A glitch, I’m sure. Did I wake briefly, under the soil? Did some ray of invisible warmth find me for a moment? Long enough to reset my counters? If so, I’m honored to be reactivated now for more meaningful service, especially by one so eminent. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Yes. Much.” Bruno runs his admiring fingers over the surface of the print plate, looking wistful and perhaps a bit sad. “I see from your diagnostic you have two human beings in your buffer. Optimized humans, bearing the unmistakable imprint of Queendom-era pattern filtration. I don’t recognize the names, but then again I wouldn’t expect to. There used to be so many people.”

“Shall I reinstantiate these two for you?” the fax machine asks, with no particular emotional emphasis. It doesn’t care one way or the other; it will simply obey the man it perceives as its king.

But Bruno shakes his head. “No, let them sleep. It’s more humane. But preserve them in your memory, fax machine. Let no misfortune befall them, if it’s within your power to prevent it. You are about to see some heavy use, and I’d prefer those patterns not be erased in the process. Is your library intact?”

“Alas, Sire, it is sorely degraded.”

“Have you any battle armor?”

“No.”

“Hmm. Have you ordinary space suits?”

“No, Sire. But I do have some police uniforms.”

“Ah. Well, that’s a starting point. I’m going to feed you material samples and provide some detailed specifications. We’re going to improvise.”

“It will be a pleasure, Sire.”

But Natan is striding forward now, the look on his face almost angry. “I’m remembering something from my classical literature, all of a sudden. That word, ‘ako’i.’ It isn’t a name at all. It’s an old term meaning, like, ‘professor’ or something.”

Bruno turns, looks over his shoulder. “You surprise me, Deceant. And you’re absolutely correct; Ako’i is not my name.”

Radmer is not accustomed to feeling like a spectator, but the two men have locked eyes, locked step in some ephemeral way, and he’s on the outside. He has nothing to say, nothing to add, no tasks to perform. He simply wants to see what these men will say next, what they’ll do. A sense of terrible importance hangs over the moment.

“Your name is Toji,” Natan accuses.

And Bruno smiles sadly. “No, that’s not it, either. But you’re very close.” He murmurs something to the fax machine, and a perfect diamond crown tumbles out into his waiting hand.

Bruno had never asked to be a king, and in many ways he’d felt himself wildly unsuited to the role. But he had learned how to play it, and more than that, to feel it. Because people could tell the difference between a leader who spoke from his heart, and one who was just going through the motions. He was an inventor, yes. A scientist and lover, yes. A father and a hermit and a failure, yes. But he was once a king as well, and he consequently understands the power of myth, to rally the spirits of men when cold reality’s at its grimmest. He has left Natan and Radmer behind, instructing them to gather raw material to feed the fax. He himself has other business.

And he’s young again! Immorbid! His black hair flowing almost to his shoulders, his black beard bristling, his veins coursing with élan vital! A medical-grade fax machine was a rarity indeed in the Iridium Days; this one may have been the last in all the world, in all the universe. Perhaps the very one he’d once employed himself, to seek the final remnants of the shattered Nescog. And he remembers with perfect clarity: by the end there had been no working collapsiters. He and Eustace Faxborn—newly widowed in some accident or other—had broadcast Royal Overrides in every band of the spectrum, had scoured the heavens for even the lowliest maintenance ping in response. But they had gathered only silence, and eventually the project had been shut down. So why are there packet acknowledgments—recent ones!—in the fax machine’s history file today? Why indeed?

His mind feels fresh. His scars and wounds have fallen away like hosed-off grime. He has designed himself a suit of Fall-era battle armor, and it fits him more perfectly then he could ever have dreamed or remembered. And with its impregnable power all around him, he feels like a king indeed, or more than a king, for the people of this world have never seen anything like him. He bounds across the dunes at a speed no mere human could sustain. He leaps and twirls, firing weapons into the ground for the sheer bleeding hell of it.

In no time at all he comes upon the wounded Dolceti, eight men and a woman huddled miserably in their hollow in the sand, and he alights among them, striking a pose that feels appropriate for the moment.

“We are successful, my friends,” he says to them through his suit’s loudspeakers. He’s tried the radio, too, but the Dolceti don’t have receivers, and anyway all the police channels seem to be drowning in interference, or in voices at such high volume that Bruno hears them only as noise. Why? From where? Is it some communication channel of the robot army? Is it something else entirely? He doesn’t know, and for the moment he doesn’t much care.

“Succor awaits,” he says to the Dolceti. “Walk into the dunes, into the ruins. Along the walls, there are flickering lights that will show you the way. Enter the top of the bronze tower, and speak with Radmer and Natan. There you’ll be healed. There you will be equipped with such armor and weapons as you’ve only heard of in stories. For the journey out of this place, and for all that follows afterward.”

But Bordi says to him, “The hair and skin look nice, sir. Truly, it’s a miracle. But you forget yourself, yes? You’re not in command here.”

“Are you sure?” says Bruno. “Then I’ll ask you, as a friend, to follow this recommendation. Time is short, and we have much to do.”

From his sprawled position on the ground, Zuq looks up at Bruno with a smirk. “God’s eyes, Ako’i, in that costume, with that hair and those eyebrows, you look like the King of Sol.”

And Bruno, sensing his moment, places the diamond crown atop the Gothic dome of his helmet, and says, “Your mother didn’t raise any fools, lad. That’s good. Now go, do as I say, and I’ll be with you shortly. I must tarry here awhile, to contemplate matters strategic.”

In fact, he needs to tarry here for a good bit of brooding—perhaps even tears—because all this has reminded him too much of his beloved Tamra, for whose smile he would gladly trade this world and all its people. Fortunately, no one is offering him that trade. No one ever will. The past is gone.

Unless perhaps some device could be constructed to interfere with it—an arc de commencer, so to speak. Bruno has never really wondered how such a device might be built, how it might operate, but perhaps now, with his mind restored to youthful vigor, is the time to give it some thought. Might he right the wrongs of his past, wiping this world’s very existence from the stage of history?

But the Dolceti—unaware of the apocalypse he so idly contemplates for them—are rising to their feet, appraising him with new eyes, weighing his stance and his words, murmuring quietly among themselves. It’s Bordi who breaks the moment, bowing his head and saying, “I always thought there was something funny about you. Now, at last, I understand. And what of the Queen?”

Bruno shakes his head. “If she were here… if she were here none of this would be happening. We used to say she had Royal Overrides for the human soul. But not the Eridanian one, alas.”

“Hmm. We owe you no fealty; you know that. You’re not our king. Or perhaps you are and always were, and your authority supersedes that of the Furies, or any other worldly power. It hardly matters, in this hour of doom. Can you save us from the armies of Astaroth? If not, then who could? I know a good bet when I see one, Sire. My sword is yours to command.”

To which Bruno answers, “Having seen your sword in action, Captain, I know full well the value you offer. Now look me in the eye and tell me you’ll fight bravely, for your world and your people.”

“You know I will.”

“Indeed. Now go.”

And they do, hauling their bodies up and limping off into the dune field, while Bruno sits his ass down to commence the aforementioned mope. He will not, he realizes now, tamper with the flow of time. Even if he could, even if he would, his very presence here in the ruins of Lune is evidence that he shan’t. Do people possess nerve endings which extend, in some ephemeral way, into the future? For even in this state of unnatural vigor, Bruno senses nothing ahead of him. He is immorbid, yes, but not immortal. He cannot imagine any future beyond the next few days.

Indeed, the hour is later than he’s thought, and the situation more dire, for as the disc of the sun slips behind the Stormlands’ eyewall to the west, over the vanishing silhouettes of the Dolceti, a bird calls out from the east, from somewhere among the scraggly trees clinging to the hills there.

ThooRAT!

ThooRAT!

Should omens be believed in this place? Bruno doesn’t know, but before another minute has passed he spies a trio of tattered figures approaching him from out of those same stony hills, from the teeth of the storm itself. There’s dust and worse raining down all around them.

Bruno calls up a sensory magnifier in the clear dome of his helmet, and scans these approaching figures in every spectrum he can think of. He’s expecting Dolceti stragglers, but in fact the newcomers are Olders. Familiar ones: Sidney Lyman and his lieutenants, Brian Romset and Nick Valdi. They look exhausted, battered, barely conscious after fighting their way through the eyewall and the raging storm beyond it. But they’re moving quickly and purposefully across the sand, because…

They’re being chased by two dozen gleaming robots.

Chapter Twenty-Three in which the old meets the new meeting the old

Bruno has faced worse odds than these, with poorer equipment to back him up, so his leap to action comes virtually without thought. He tears across the sandy plains, confident of passing Lyman and his fellows before their dainty attackers can reach them. And the look on their faces when he does pass is, he thinks, worth the thousands of years of solitude that carried him to this point. At long last he has become a sort of Buddhist, or a factory-issue mammal, fully present in the moment, able to appreciate the humor of it all and yet caring little about the outcome. He will simply do his best to smash these robots, and see what happens.

And that best is quite good indeed, for as he arrives among them they stab and hack with whirling blades that might easily have severed his head from the brickmail-reinforced neck that supports it. The blades are that sharp, yes, the blows that fast and hard. This time, the robots mean business; they’re saving nothing for the trip back home. But what Bruno lacks in speed he more than makes up for in sheer capacity; the attacks push him this way and that, but his unscathed armor scarcely sheds a molecule.

And meanwhile he’s grabbing swords, grabbing arms, firing energy beams at point-blank range. He doesn’t even bother to aim for the iron boxes on the sides of their heads; those are for merely human weapons to pierce. Bruno was never a great warrior; he merely happened to be present at a few of history’s most crucial battles. And while the abomination of blindsight training still crackles inside him, informing his actions, he is no Dolceti. Just a man, just some guy in a suit of armor. So if these robots were combat models he might have cause to worry.

But they aren’t, and he doesn’t; their impervium hulls are thin, never meant to withstand the burn of a gamma-ray laser or the punch of a hypersonic wirebomb. He’s got a blitterstaff slung across his back which he doesn’t even bother to use, because it’s cleansing to fight this one out hand-to-hand.

And the robots seem to get the message; they’ve never encountered anything like him before, either, and as five of them collapse into sparking fragments during the first few seconds of combat, the rest retreat to a safer distance, ten and twenty meters back so that Bruno must aim more carefully to hit them. And aiming carefully is not one of his better skills, and the robots are circling and regrouping with inhuman grace and fluidity, and he’s just deciding to unsling that blitterstaff after all when they suddenly leap upon him en masse.

Oh. Oh, dear.

He goes down under their weight, sprawling onto his back with a robot on each arm, a robot on each leg, two on his chest, and a dozen standing round him like the outlines of an angel. They raise their swords, preparing to peel him out of his wellstone skin no matter how long it takes.

Fortunately, there’s a response for this in the annals of the Queendom’s martial arts, with which Bruno was once, of necessity, familiar. “Discharge all!” he screams at the suit, and it responds by turning to glass underneath him and then opening up its capacitors, dumping all their stored charge. For a few nanoseconds he’s crawling with surface electrons, which quickly find their way to the ground through every object within easy arcing distance. The voltage is high, but it’s the wattage that really counts, burning paths through the robots’ own wellstone, through the very circuitry that controls them, through libraries of collective memory and programmed response. From a distance it looks like an explosion, and indeed it sends eleven robots flipping through the air, dazed and befuddled, parts of them damaged beyond repair.

And in the wake of that, Bruno shouts: “Royal override! All autronic devices, stand down and await instructions!”

The robots will not obey this command, but he knows from experience that they’ll recognize it in some way, that it will confuse them for a moment. And he takes advantage, struggling to his feet in a garment that has gone stiff and lifeless, gone black in a last-ditch attempt to drink in energy from the sky.

There are eight attackers left on their feet, staring at him with their blank metal faces, and he steps backward through a gap between them, unslinging the blitterstaff. This is a weapon that requires no finesse; it’s coded to ignore his suit, but any other wellstone it touches—for example, the impervium of a robot hull—will be subjected to an intense barrage of electrical and software and pseudochemical insults, in random patterns shifting too rapidly for the robots’ defenses.

He touches one, and it falls apart into screaming, steaming shards. Touches another, and it bursts like a chestnut in a fire. But the other six have their wits about them now, and are dancing toward him with deadly intent. There’s nothing for it but to whirl the staff around him, not with any great skill but in a simple space-filling function that leaves no room for a robot to pass. He clobbers another two before a third one manages to slip in at ground level—literally crawling on its back!—and take a firm hold on his legs. He kills that one, too, but not before he loses his balance again and tumbles over the back of another one crouching behind him.

Blast, he thinks as the ground rushes up again, these robots are cleverer than they ought to be. He shouldn’t have taken them on alone—not that he’d had much choice. Now he’s facedown in the sand, and when the first blow slices down at his neck he tries to struggle away sideways, but something is holding him. He tries to raise the blitterstaff, but something is weighing it down. He tries to fire his wrist-mounted wireguns again, but of course there’s no power. Not yet, not for another few seconds at least. The blindsight part of his mind is painfully, terrifyingly aware of that blade rushing down. And there isn’t a thing it can do.

The blow lands solidly, and Bruno’s suit is no longer absurdly durable. In fact, it’s just a fine-mesh silicon cloth, not much different from old-fashioned fiberglass. The blade doesn’t penetrate, but it does concentrate a great deal of force on a rather narrow stripe of neck. The impact is like a flash, a shock, a crashing together of cymbals. Heedless of his dignity, the King of Sol screams in rage.

But this recalls another bit of Queendom battle lore: when all else fails, there is power in a scream. In a brief burst of strength he manages to lift himself, to roll a bit, to make the next blow come down in a different place and at a less-favorable angle. He manages to jerk the blitterstaff free of whatever was holding it, and to sweep it around him in a ground-level arc. It hits something along the way, although he has no idea what, or whether it’ll help him.

And now, finally, he fears for his safety. As a result, the next few seconds of the fight are pure blindsight; Bruno sees nothing, and is only vaguely aware of himself in the conscious sense. He is motion and shadow. Then his vision flickers on: once, twice, like a heartbeat and then a constant hum, and he’s on his feet, and the sand around him is littered with robot bodies. Some of these are dead and shattered, and some are dragging themselves pathetically toward him, as if they might still somehow injure him with the last of their strength. Their bodies have gone black, too, groping for solar energy, although there’s a fine grit of storm-blown dust settling onto them from above. They’ll be buried long before any self-repair can kick in.

Still, there’s something so purposeful about it all that he pauses for a moment, wondering whether finishing these bastards off might be some kind of sin. But he’s spared the trouble when the crack of a rifle sounds, and the nearest robot head explodes. Then another, then another, until there are no robots left.

And then Sidney Lyman is rising from the crest of a dune, dusting himself off, and the other two Olders are there at his side.

“Bloody glints,” one of them mutters.

Bruno squats for a moment, panting, just looking at the three men while he regains his breath. Finally he says, “Gentlemen. Welcome to Shanru Basin. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“You weren’t fooling anyone, Sire,” Sidney says to that.

“Hmm?”

“Admittedly, it took us a while to figure it out. I mean, we hadn’t seen your face in what, two thousand years? But it clicked. Right after you left, me and the boys here were just kind of looking at each other, saying, ‘Whoops, that was kind of stupid.’ I sent most of the unit back to Echo Valley, but for my own self I just… needed to be here. You and Radmer, you’re off to fight the Glimmer King. Without me! Without my boys, here! Look at you: you’re young. You’re armored. You just took on twenty-some robots all by yourself, saving our sorry asses. Fucking King of Sol.”

“Sorry to trouble you,” Bruno says to him, meaning it. “You don’t owe me a thing. Quite the reverse: I’m responsible for all the misery you see around you.”

“Oh, piffle,” Sidney says, almost spitting the words. He looks utterly exhausted, but this flare of anger is enough to keep him going for a little while longer. “You haven’t even been here. You think we can’t fuck a world up all by ourselves? Listen, you, we’re here for… for…”

“Closure,” says Brian.

“Right. Closure. And you’re going to give it to us.”

Bruno blinks. “Are you here to assassinate me?” It’s a strange concept; on some level it’s exactly what he deserves, and yet he cannot allow it to happen. Not now, not yet.

But Sidney just rolls his eyes. “Oh, please. We’re here because it puts some…”

“Meaning,” says Brian.

“Right. On all the fuffing time we’ve killed on this planette. Hiding out is not the same thing as actually turning the place over to a new…”

“Generation?” suggests Nick Valdi.

“No. A new paradigm. A new society. Free from all this debris. From all our broken dreams.” He points vaguely in the direction of Manassa.

Bruno eyes these three raggedy men carefully, seeing no deception in them, no weakness. They will fight, even if they cannot say exactly why.

“I understand,” he says, for he truly does. “Up there in the ruins is a fax machine which will get you back in fighting condition. But it’s no substitute for rest, after a journey through the Stormlands. A little farther into the dunes, you’ll find our camp. The sand is very soft there.”

But Sidney Lyman just laughs at that. “Your Majesty, do you think we just happened to run into a scouting patrol here? The enemy may not have figured out what you’re up to, but they know you’re up to something. There’s about fifteen thousand robots on the march, and they’ll be here, oh, any minute now.”

“Ah,” Bruno says, processing that. On the face of it, it’s very bad news indeed. But how much does it really change? “Well, I suppose we can all rest when we’re safely dead and buried. In the meantime, come with me. Quickly, if you please.”

By the time Bruno returns to the bronze tower, with Lyman and his men in tow, Radmer has already fed most of the Dolceti through the fax. They’re standing around now, admiring each other in their battle armor, which Radmer has done up in bright, dolcet-berry yellow with a subtle metallic finish. Their blitterstaves are a shade of dully glowing crimson that complements the uniforms nicely.

At the sight of it Bruno feels yet another pang for the Queendom, whose sense of style—and ability to follow through on it!—was unmatched by any society before or after. On those terms, King Bruno had been an embarrassment to his people, who were forever beseeching him not to wear anything in public which had not first been approved by his wife, or one of her courtiers, or his own valet, or even Slappy Luzarre, who for one thousand years sold bananas from a wagon on the street outside the palace gates. But like any mathematician, Bruno could recognize beauty when he saw it, and he’d seen it everywhere in the Queendom. Here on Lune, even the Iridium Days had been drab by comparison.

Radmer himself is wearing reflective inviz, which is like regular inviz except that it’s purely passive, illuminated only by ambient light and reflection. Consuming far less energy than a full stealthing cloak, it doesn’t attempt to match the radiant brightness of sun or sky, and it leaves a clear, sunset-elongated shadow upon the dunes. His head and hands are also visible.

“What do you mean I’m a copy of my old self?” Mission Mother Mathy is demanding of his floating, disembodied head. “Did I die? Did that thing in there kill me and take my soul?”

“Will you calm down?” Radmer replies wearily. But not all that wearily, for he too is young again, and looks exactly like the Conrad Mursk who agreed, so long ago, to crush this moon for fun and profit.

“No one knows the fate of a human soul,” Bruno says, striding up, “when the body is destroyed and recopied. But such adventures were commonplace in the Queendom, and though we were vigilant—especially in the beginning!—for signs of spiritual decay, none were ever observed. The process is, to all tests and appearances, safe. And better than safe, for you’ve been rendered immorbid.”

“Oh, my, God,” Mathy says, horrified.

Hmm. Apparently these people are deathists. And why not, with only decayed, bitter Olders around to show what immorbidity was like? Well, no help for it. He says, not just to Mathy but to all of them, “Fear not, for though your bodies cannot grow old, they most certainly can be killed. And as we speak, there’s a robot army marching through the eyewall that will gladly make it happen.”

Indeed, on the hills just this side of the eyewall, glints of light have begun to appear, reflecting the blurry red of the sunset behind the eyewall’s other face. If they’re undamaged by the storm, and move at the speed of household robots, they’ll be here in twenty minutes. Perhaps less.

To Sidney and Brian and Nick he says, “Refresh yourselves quickly, in there.”

“Hello, sir,” they say to Radmer in passing.

“Hi,” he says back. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

Then, looking out unhappily at the approaching glints, Radmer asks Bruno, “What of Highrock? Is Tillspar in enemy hands already?”

“I haven’t heard. But this army apparently followed the southern route, bypassing the Divide. So there may yet be reason to hope.”

“For now. How many are coming? Are we enough to hold this site against them?”

“Perhaps,” Bruno says, though even with Queendom equipment he doubts it very much. The odds are just tilted too steeply in the enemy’s favor. “But we may find greater advantage in moving onward.”

“A fighting retreat? I’ll begin the weapons training immediately.”

“Do that, yes,” Bruno says, “But first there’s something you should know. This machine here”—he waves a hand at the bronze tower-top sticking out of the sand—“is in contact with at least three collapsiters, somewhere in the lower Kuiper Belt, just above Neptune’s orbit. A bit of Nescog survives!”

“How is that possible?” asks an incredulous Radmer. “We would have known, long ago.”

Before the Shattering, yes. Even before the Murdered Earth cracked and fell in itself and breathed a last puff of air from the lungs of its dying billions. Curses, mostly, with Bruno’s name figuring prominently among them.

“Indeed we would,” Bruno agrees. “And something as complex and fragile as a collapsiter doesn’t simply reconstitute itself. Perhaps the hand of God has intervened on our behalf, or perhaps the hand of Man, if Lune is not the last bastion of us after all. It hardly matters at this late hour, General. My point is simply that I can take us out of here. Swiftly and without a trace.”

“To where?” asks Radmer.

And here Bruno cannot help grinning, for there’s nothing more just in this world than turning a villain’s own dirty tricks against him. “The survival of a fax machine for this long without maintenance is surprising, but hardly incredible. It’s use that wears them down. And the gates are just as durable, so it’s reasonable to suppose they’re intact. I’d be more surprised if they weren’t.”

“So, what? We fax out and back? Use the speed-of-light delays as a kind of time bomb, and step out of the plate ten or twelve hours after we left?”

Impatiently, Bruno tries to run a hand through his hair, but bangs up against the dome of his helmet instead. “Listen, all right? Ours is not the only fax machine. We’ve assumed another all along. In Astaroth, yes? In the Glimmer King’s own presumed fortress, somewhere in the vicinity of the south pole. It will take hours, yes, for our signal to travel to the outer system and back. But when it does, we can step right to the heart of this world’s problems. And solve them.”

“Oh,” says Radmer. He seems stunned to blankness by that remark, but slowly he recovers himself, and finally matches Bruno’s grin. “That sounds a bit dangerous, old man. Are you sure you’re up to the task?”

“As sure as the sun shines, my boy. I’ve penetrated a fearsome lair or two in my day. And I hadn’t the Dolceti with me then, nor you, nor the element of surprise. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a three-thousand-year-old telecom network to fix.”

Alas, this proves more difficult than he’d assumed at first. The collapsiters are clearly pinging and responding to pings, but sorting through the fax machine’s comm logs, he’s baffled at first by the nonsense he finds there. He built the Nescog, and while the passage of time has bleached out the specific details of its comm protocol, he does at least recognize his own work when he sees it. And this is something… else.

This isn’t Nescog at all, but some derivative coding system built upon it. When? By whom? Could it be the fabled Shadow Network of the Fatalist ghouls? A hundred gigatons of collapsium could not be hidden in the Old Solar System—every collapsiter was known and tracked—but a parasitic protocol running secretly in the margins… Well, it isn’t impossible, but it still doesn’t explain how dead collapsiters have turned back into live ones. And anyway something in him doubts that explanation. It fails Occam’s Razor; it’s too complex. Something else is going on.

Alas, the mystery will have to wait for another time; with a few minutes of study he’s able to decipher the important features of the log file, and construct an access request that will race out ahead of their own corporeal images, logging them on to the mystery network just in time to be routed through it, and also scanning for additional gates and logging them on, involuntarily. A hostile takeover of the Glimmer King’s fax. Or so he hopes; if the process fails, they’ll bounce right back here again, to face the robot army.

“They’re coming!” someone shouts down to him from outside.

Well, yes. That goes without saying. Of the fax he asks, “Does this transaction look valid to you?”

“I have never seen one like it, Sire,” the fax replies, from a speaker grown adjacent to its print plate. “But it appears to be a valid construction.”

“Then implement it, under full Royal Override.”

“Doing so.”

“Architect!” he shouts then through the open doorway. “We’re ready! Start sending people through!”

But something’s wrong; there’s a rising din and clatter out there. The battle has begun, or rather resumed. Blast. He races outside, prepared for the worst, and sees pretty much what he expects: the site is overrun. Already there are dozens of robots down and dozens more swarming among the Dolceti, and there are hundreds pouring over the nearby dunes. Presumably thousands racing upward through the dune field, out of sight for the moment but not planning on staying that way for long.

“Radmer!” he shouts, blasting his voice over the loudspeakers. “Bordi! Get the Dolceti through the fax!”

“I’m not going in there,” someone protests, over the grunt and clatter of combat and the death screams of household robots.

“You’re not staying here,” someone else remarks. And a third voice—Mathy’s—adds, “I’m not going first, I’ll tell you that much.”

Bruno pauses to smash down a pair of attackers, and then says, “General Radmer will go first. Then Sidney Lyman and his men, for they’ll know better what to expect on the other side.” He pauses again to rescue a fallen comrade, then continues, “Next will go Natan and Zuq and Mathy, and all the rest of you, and”—he fires an energy blast at a nearby hilltop, scattering the robots there in a burst of sand and sundered wellstone, and sorely depleting his energy reserves once again—“and finally Bordi.”

“You’re not going last,” Bordi says, while laying about him with the blitterstaff in decisive blindsight strokes. “Not if I have anything to say about it!”

“You do not,” Bruno answers, “for only I can seal the gates behind us, and prevent this army from pouring through in pursuit.”

“Good luck,” says Radmer, on his way down into the pit and through the doorway. Lyman and the other Olders follow behind, murmuring similar sentiments, and then the Dolceti are making their retreat, stepping backward into the pit while hundreds of robots swarm in after them. It’s dicey for a few moments when the sheer weight of attackers thrusts Mathy and two other Dolceti away from the doorway. It fills with robots, which pour inside like a fluid. And then it’s worse, when the three of them are lifted off their feet and hoisted into the air, faceup, struggling upon the upraised hands of dozens upon dozens of robots. Bruno does what he can, firing wirebombs into the fray at the rate of fifty per second, but his aim is hasty and there are just too many targets moving too quickly, and his charge and munitions are low. Mathy and the others don’t know the power of their suits, their weapons. Of the several moves they could make right now, few are obvious to an untrained person.

Bitterly, Bruno makes an executive decision, and allows the robots to carry the three Dolceti away. He must concentrate on clearing that doorway, and holding it, or all these people will be lost, and their world along with them.

“Mathy!” someone shouts in tones of pained helplessness. And then, on the heels of that, “Stupid sow. Keep your feet!”

But the flood has taken them; they’re out of sight now, out of mind, and Bruno is using every milligram of martial skill he can summon, to drive Bordi and the four remaining Dolceti forward through the impervium swarm, which gleams and flickers in the light of sunset.

Another Dolceti goes down and is swept away. Then another, and then two, and finally it’s just Bruno and Bordi in the doorway, with shattered robots piling higher and higher around them, threatening to block the way. Bruno shouts, “Go! Quickly!”

The diamond crown is knocked off his head and spins away into the heaving robot stream. As Bordi falls back into the tower room, fighting his way through the robots still inside, Bruno is forced to acknowledge that he has never, in fact, faced a battle as dire as this. The attackers are not well armed or armored, but in such numbers there’s little he can do to stop them. Soon enough his suit charge will be zero again, and like so many voracious termites they’ll be carrying him away.

He’s out of time, and he can’t spare a glance to see whether Bordi has gotten through safely or not. To the walls he shouts, “Fax! Royal Lockout! Pass no objects save myself! Walls! Release all fields and power down permanently!”

“Acknowledged,” the fax replies calmly, unaware of His Majesty’s peril and possibly incapable of understanding it. “Immediately, Sire,” say the walls, which go dark, reverting to blank wellstone. And then the sides of the sand pit slide inward, carrying live robots down with them and burying several. Bruno retreats inside.

And that’s that: no one but he will ever use this place again, for travel or medicine or resupply. The Royal Lockouts and Overrides were built into the Queendom’s wellstone at the deepest levels. Subverting them had always been possible, but insanely difficult. The sands will reclaim this place in minutes or hours, and since Bruno does not expect to pass this way again, the sands and the lockouts will remain. One more treasure of Lune consumed for the sake of this stupid war.

Along with the two human patterns still stored within it. He thinks of them suddenly: the final victims of the Queendom’s demise. Should he wake them amid all this clamor? To die afresh, without the least understanding of why? No. Better to let them sleep. Better to worry about his own skin for a little while longer!

The trick, now, is to battle the rushing tide of sand and robots, to protect his front and his back without actually whacking the fax machine with his blitterstaff. Because that would kill it even for him.

There’s a bad moment when the robots team up to high-low him again, tumbling him off his feet. He feels strong hands on his ankles, preparing to lift him, to carry him away! But with the wellcloth of his suit still active, he manages to call up a slippery exterior and wriggle free, leaping and sliding for the fax plate ahead of him. His momentum is sufficient—just barely!—to carry him through.

The plate crackles blue for a moment and then falls forever silent.

Chapter Twenty-Four in which the fortress of a traveler is breached

Once through the gate, the first thing Bruno notices is absolute silence. There’s no battle on this side, no scream and crash. The second thing is the trio of bright yellow Dolceti crowded in front of him: Bordi and Natan and Zuq. And since he’s still slipping along the floor on his hands and knees, the third thing he notices is the tussle of bodies falling all around him like tenpins, their blindsight reflexes lacking the time or the space to operate.

“Oof,” says Zuq.

But the Olders, crowded just ahead in this narrow passageway, are still on their feet, poised at a corner and looking out.

“They don’t see us,” Sidney Lyman is murmuring.

“They see,” Radmer corrects. “They don’t react.”

“Excuse me,” Bruno says to the Dolceti. He wipes away the suit’s slippery skin program and staggers to his feet, pleased to find himself still alive. Successfully teleported, yes, for the first time in millennia, and under circumstances far from ideal. He steps over the men while they’re attempting, in the unfamiliar bulk of their armor, to rise. At the corner he taps Nick and Brian out of his way, and has a look.

The room is full of robots.

Specifically, it’s full of unarmed robots, engaged in the task of filling buckets with sand. And filling smaller vials with measured amounts of other substances: black carbon and white, shiny metals, poured from the sort of long-beaked glass orbs. Finally, the vials are emptied into the buckets, which are placed on a slow-moving conveyor. The light is a sickly yellow-green, from phosphor-coated electric bulbs set in sconces along the walls. Like many on this world, the walls are interlocking blocks of cut stone. The whole scene looks like nothing so much as an ancient alchemist’s workshop.

Presently, a pair of robots fetch one heavy bucket each, and begin walking toward the fax machine. With his staff at the ready, Bruno sidles out of the way, while Radmer and Sidney press themselves against the wall, turning their suits to full inviz. But indeed, these robots take no notice of their workshop’s invaders, simply crowding around them on their way to the fax.

Then the buckets are hurled right through the print plate, which crackles and sputters in accepting them. From the ozone smell alone, Bruno can tell this machine is on its last legs, relying heavily on error correction to smooth over its many burned-out faxels. Under other circumstances, this might be disturbing; how much damage and drift did they all incur, in printing themselves through that used-up old plate? But under these circumstances, it hardly matters.

Presently, the plate crackles again and a shiny new robot emerges, carrying perfect copies of the hurled-in buckets. It isn’t gleaming mirror-bright, though, or anyway most of it isn’t. Instead, its impervium hull is surrounded—except on the joints and sensory pits—by an outer layer of glassy ceramic painted in green and brown camouflage spots. Once free of the fax, it steps around the Dolceti and follows its shinier brothers out into the workshop, where another robot hands it a rifle—not a sword but a rifle, with a bayonet fixed at the business end. And then it walks out through an open archway and vanishes down a corridor.

“Well,” says Radmer, “here, as promised, is the source of all our trouble. They seem to be printing one every three minutes. That’s what, twenty-four hundred robots per Luner day? More than enough for the task at hand.”

“It’s not the source,” says Bordi, eyeing the print plate with superstitious awe. “This is just a clever tool. The source is the Glimmer King himself.”

“True,” Radmer admits.

To which Bruno says, “We shall deal with him soon enough.”

He pulls a wellstone sketchplate—a proper one this time!—out of his pocket, and begins programming sensor algorithms. He can’t simply interrogate the walls, for the walls are merely stone. But he can analyze the sound waves reflecting and refracting through the building’s corridors. He can measure cosmic radiation and its secondary cascades to gauge the amount and type of material between floor and sky. He can measure heat and vibration, light and magnetic fields. He can even, given enough time, image the neutrino absorption of the structure and build a literal image in three dimensions. That process could take months, though, so he leaves it running in the background and forgets about it. Even without it, a crude sketch of the building begins, slowly, to emerge.

Meanwhile, though, two more robots have been printed, issued rifles, and sent on their way.

“They’ve given up on swords,” Zuq observes.

“Worse than that,” says Bruno, “they’ve developed a blit-resistant outer shell, insulating and nonprogrammable. Look at this, it’s glass. Tempered, reinforced, camouflage-painted glass. We’ll need to crack through it before the blitterstaves can do their work. Which is troubling, because it means they’ve been analyzing the battle in Shanru.”

“Their first real defeat,” says Radmer. “Their work has gotten more difficult as they’ve moved northward, but they’ve just thrown more hardware at it. They’ve never needed to shift tactics before.”

“Well, they’re clearly capable of it; we’ve only been away for ten hours, and already they’re responding. Surprise is not entirely ours, though they don’t seem to expect us here.”

“Right,” says Bordi. “So let’s move. Let’s finish this while we can. They’ve seized samples of this armor”—he pinches his own shoulder for emphasis—“and you can bet they’ll soon be wrapping that around their soldiers. I’d give it a day or two at the very most.”

“Indeed,” says Bruno. “An excellent point. Astaroth’s military expenditures clearly need to be capped.” That said, he heads back toward the fax machine with purposeful strides and raps its print plate hard with the butt of his staff. The effect is immediate; it flickers, coughs out a cloud of glittering dust, and then darkens and fades like the eyes of a dying beast.

Still another Queendom treasure removed from the game board that is Lune. It’s a cultural apocalypse and a damned shame, but Bruno can see no other way forward. The past is not quite dead, and that’s the problem.

Unfortunately, while the arrival of back-door intruders didn’t raise any alarms, the interruption of power through the fax machine does. Almost immediately, electric bells are ringing throughout the fortress, and the only clear advantage is that this fills in a lot of echo data on Bruno’s map. He’s seen a fortress or two in his day, and a fair number of palaces, and he knows a throne room when he sees one. And if this king is not on his throne—which seems unlikely, given all that Bruno knows of his character—then he may well be in the apartments behind them, or in one of the hidey-holes nearby.

Bruno gestures and points, then calls out over the clattering bells, “Look for the Glimmer King one floor up, and thirty meters that way. I shall lead.”

“No,” says Radmer. “No way. Men, kindly surround him. Protect him with your lives. Let’s get him there in one piece!”

And with that, their luck has officially run dry; a sea of glass-skinned robotic troopers pours through the workshop’s entrance, with rifles aimed and triggers already halfway pulled. Unsynchronized chemical explosions fire up and down the line, hurling projectiles at the suited Olders and Dolceti.

They really can slap bullets in flight, Bruno sees with wonder, watching Zuq and Bordi—with movements almost too quick to follow—knock away one projectile each. The Olders, for their part, favor a quieter strategy of simply staying out of the firing arcs. It’s like every rifle has a laser beam projecting out of it, showing where its bullets will strike; Radmer and Sidney and the others simply watch these invisible beams and calmly step around them, mostly with very small movements. But it’s not enough. Bruno sees right away that both methods will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of guns and bullets in play.

And it’s worse than that, for the projectiles are no mere bullets of lead, but needle-sharp cones of some material sandwich that’s both charged and highly magnetic. On impact, they pierce a little way into the wellcloth armor and then let go their charge in spiraling bursts. It’s a crude attack as such things go, but it will damage wellstone fibers. Enough hits like that and the suits will develop dead spots, through which these darts should eventually penetrate. And the robots’ rate of fire is impressive; in the first five seconds of the engagement Bruno himself—at the protected center—is struck by ten or twenty.

Still, once the initial shock has worn off the Olders and Dolceti are on the offensive again, pressing forward with blitterstaves, with wirebombs and laser light. The new robots aren’t that tough, and they wither and crumple under the attack. Which is, in its own way, a bad thing for the human side, because it saves the robots the trouble of moving out of the way when they’re out of ammunition. Those bayonets are cute, but against two centimeters of live wellcloth they’re of little use. Bullets are the real danger here, and the hail of them continues. By the time the men are out in the corridor and striking for a stairwell up ahead, their suits are already showing signs of wear.

The darts must have some poison upon them as well, for on the stairs themselves, Bruno watches one penetrate Sidney Lyman’s armor. Lyman flinches and gasps and then crumples to his knees, and is grabbed and hoisted and carried up and away by strong robot hands. There are enemies both behind them and in front, and at the top of the stairs it’s Nick Valdi who yelps and collapses and tumbles backward into certain doom. And then in another hallway it’s Natan’s turn, and his end is uglier than the others, for it involves a spray of bright arterial blood on the inside of his helmet dome. Bruno watches it all through his rearview mirrors, and mourns.

But next they’re at the entrance to the throne room and fighting their way inside, dodging and slapping a storm of projectiles. Bruno even swats one aside himself, feeling the buzz of its approach and reacting without thought.

And then they’re in. Glass windows look out on a set of low hills, illuminated by evening twilight, and if this truly is the south pole, locked in permanent shadow, then it’s always evening here. Or else—Bruno hardly dares to think it—it’s always morning. Each moment beginning the world afresh.

The throne itself is a predictably gaudy affair of golden arms and lion’s feet and a great sunburst disc spreading out behind. But there’s no Glimmer King in it, just another robot. Or is it?

Amid the broken bodies of a dozen determined attackers, Brian Romset, the last of Lyman’s Olders, goes down in a mess of his own guts and hacked-off limbs. But Bruno scarcely notices; his eyes are on that throne. On the robot on that throne. The robot which has no iron box welded to the side of its head, but rather a crown of gold soldered round its brow. The robot whose scratched, worn, battered hull bespeaks long years of wear and tear, and something more, for ordinary robots never show that kind of damage pattern.

Indeed, it’s the clear fingerprint of an emancipated ’bot, left to find its own way in the world. And there is something chillingly familiar about this one, about the tilt of its head and the lazy dangle of its arms. Bruno’s worst fear—his prime suspicion—has proven out.

“Hugo!” he cries to the figure on the throne. “Stop this, I beseech you. Royal Override: stand down and await instructions!”

And just like that, the defending robots are frozen in their tracks. Zuq takes the opportunity to smash another one down with a blow to its exposed armpit, but he sees Bruno’s glare, and does nothing further. Which is good, because Bruno knows full well that his overrides have no power over this seated creature. He has merely intrigued it.

“Hugo,” he says, stepping toward the throne in a daze of sorrow.

But with its blank, mouthless face the robot answers, “Why do you… call us that, Father? Do you not recognize us?”

Bruno pauses, while hope and fear war within him. “Bascal?”

“Don’t be a fool,” says Radmer beside him. “What is this thing? Where is the King of Barnard, who has written so much villainy across our landscape?”

The robot’s laughter is cool, unfriendly, more than a little unhinged. Its face is turned exactly toward Bruno, ignoring Radmer, ignoring everything. “You needn’t act so… shocked, Father. Our condition—my condition—did not arise by accident. Or had you… forgotten?”

Indeed, Bruno had not. That lapse of judgment—a desecration of all that human beings hold dear—is woven deeply through the tatters of his conscience. Pouring a copy of his tyrant son into the only copy of his pet robot!

“This is the King of Barnard,” Bruno says, amazed at the weight of his sin now that it confronts him face-to-face. Poor Lune, to suffer so greatly for his mistakes! “Parts of him, anyway.”

He’d known it was a bad idea even at the time, but he was very curious to see what would happen. And he’d missed his Poet Prince, yes, the last link to his old life. He’d longed to speak with that boy again, if only for an hour, a minute, a word. Memories can be edited! There was some etiological and mnemonic and engrammatic surgery involved, far more elegant than a simple cut and meld. The approach was sound and carefully—if hastily—reasoned.

But Bruno was no surgeon, and the road to hell is paved with careful plans. The effort had been furtive because it would find no support if revealed. He had no friends or relations left; he worked alone, in secret, as far from the ashes of civilization as Boat Gods’ fuel supply could safely carry him. Which wasn’t far. And the result had been more horrific than even a pessimist would predict; he’d shut the monster down barely five minutes into the experiment.

“You have proved yourself unworthy of even my… disdain,” it had told him, with halting but vehement passion. “Beware, for I’m incapable of fear.” It had said other things, too, of a vile and personal nature. And the worst of it was that it sounded exactly like Bascal. It moved exactly like Hugo. It was the perfect synthesis of the two, and the conversation had begun well enough, with prancing bows and twirls and snippets of spontaneous verse. “Ah, to exist! To have a… form to which the soul might cling! A clever… thing, and sorely missed.”

But that exuberance was not to last, for the creature had made demands. Lightly at first, and then angrily, and then with threats of force. Had it realized its peril it might have kept up the illusion awhile longer, and so escaped into the world, into the ruined solar system, into the universe at large. But the experiment was structured so that keeping his creation alive required a conscious act of will on Bruno’s part. In his first stab of real fear, that concentration had wavered and the delicate quantum waveforms had collapsed. The monster had died. Bruno had buried it in secret, and never breathed a word about it to any living person. Iridium Days, indeed.

In the wake of this final failure, he’d powered up his grappleship—one of the last of its kind—and sent it puttering into the void without him. Marooning himself, yes. Perchance to starve, though he’d ultimately failed at that as well.

“I turned you off,” he says now. “I buried you in space. I would have fed you into the fax if it had been working. I should have fed you into the sun.”

On the throne, the ancient robot considers these words, and slowly nods. “Or vice versa. It’s… good to see you, Father. I had no idea you were still alive. When first my resurrection was upon me, I… thought myself awakened by providence. I felt it: the finger of God upon me, commanding life. It commanded nothing else, but the… ship had awakened as well. From nowhere had appeared a sparkle of stored energy—enough to carry me down, to this… world I found myself circling. I survived the crash, and if the fax machine was dead for you, Father, then the… finger of God must have touched it as well. For I stepped into it once, and out of it twice. And from that moment, my… path has been clear. To reestablish a monarchy over all that exists.”

The story makes no sense—the “Glimmer King” is clearly deranged—but Bruno can picture this much: one robot overpowering its faxed twin, strapping it down, tinkering with its circuitry until resistance ceases and obedience is absolute. And then feeding this perfect soldier back into the fax machine to create an army. Capturing first a village, then a fortress, a city, a world. Spreading outward in relentless waves, to fill the universe with some strange echo of Bascal’s would-be paradise.

Ah, God, Bascal did have vision. Would so many have followed him otherwise? To their ruin and his? He’d understood the human heart as well as his mother, though he’d used the knowledge very differently. Very differently.

“Stop all this,” Bruno says to the thing in the chair. “Please. You’re defective; your very construction prevents you from grasping the horrors you’ve spawned, the horror you are. The responsibility is mine. You have no idea what I’ve done here, through you. But take my word: the society you dream of cannot be built on a foundation of murder. It must be freely chosen, and chosen anew with every morning. It must be the sum total dream of all who dwell within it.”

“Ah,” says the Glimmer King, “but the mind of meat is wounded by its own imperfections. It is you who cannot conceive the totality of my vision. I knew it the… moment I awoke: that in the quantum-crystalline purity of my thoughts I was blessed, and more than blessed. Do not blame yourself, Bruno, for it was… God’s own hand that crafted me. You were merely the instrument.”

“What the hell is going on?” demands Radmer. “Is this the Glimmer King? This? Bascal’s recording in a robot body? Are you kidding me?”

And finally, the robot’s head swivels toward Radmer. There’s a sound, a kind of electronic gasp or grunt or snigger, and then Bascal’s voice again: “Conrad Mursk? Do I… dream? Is that you I see before me, fighting at my own father’s… side, whom once you fought against?”

“Aye,” says Radmer, and spits on the inside of his helmet dome. “Though I’m called Radmer now, and have sworn to kill you on sight.”

“Radmer!” says the Glimmer King. “Ah! How many… times we’ve heard that name, Hugo and I! From books, from songs, from the lips of tortured prisoners! I… should have known it was you, always sticking your nose in the business of others. How little surprised I am to find you here! I knew someday we would… face each other again, and you would be called to account for your wrongs against me. And yet, now that the… moment is here I can only recall that you twice saved my life.” He spreads his arms. “Give us a… kiss, me boyo, and join us in remaking this world.”

“If you owe me anything, then stop this war,” Radmer says coldly. He, too, seems little surprised now that the shock has worn off. It makes sense; Bascal’s name had been mentioned more than once in connection with the Glimmer King, by the robot soldiers themselves! The Senatoria Plurum in Nubia had even written it into their formal record, which Radmer claimed to have carried away with his own hands. But surely the real Bascal had ended his days swinging from a Barnardean lamppost, a lynch mob’s noose slowly throttling the life from his damnably hard-to-kill body. And even if he hadn’t, could he have come so far? Marshaled the resources of his dying colony to send his only self back here? Perhaps, yes. But he didn’t.

“Ah,” says the Glimmer King, sounding regretful. “I could wish for you to… disappoint me, but alas your character holds firm.” He rises from his throne, steps down from the dais, and walks toward Bruno and Radmer.

“Halt,” say Bordi and Zuq together, raising their blitterstaves to block the way.

But suddenly the battle is on again; robot soldiers are swarming the two, and though they fight hard to protect their charges, there are only two of them against an infinite supply of attackers. They’re driven back, and the Glimmer King continues to advance.

“Halt,” Radmer warns him in the same tone, raising his own staff.

But the Glimmer King’s mind, however defective, is faster than meat. In his impervium hand is a miniature blitterstick, of the sort sometimes carried by Olders in this world. Of the sort Radmer himself had carried, until the battle of Shanru afforded him a stouter weapon. With it Bascal easily blocks Radmer’s feint, and where the two sticks touch there’s immediate trouble; they attack each other as easily as they attack mere impervium. There are sizzles and pops and flashes of light, and both weapons fall to dust.

Then, with offhand grace, Bascal kicks Radmer hard in the stomach, and raises a hand in the air. As if by magic, another blitterstick flips into his grasp, hurled by one of the robots somewhere in the room. He touches it to Radmer’s suit, which has some built-in resistance and doesn’t immediately fail. But it does burn and sizzle in glowing, expanding rings, and Radmer shouts, “Escape sequence!” Unnecessarily, for the suit, sensing that he’s not surrounded by vacuum or poison, is already peeling away. Better no armor than dying, defective armor! There’s another blow to Radmer’s stomach—unprotected this time—and he falls away, gagging and coughing.

And then the Glimmer King is attacking Bruno, striking down his staff and his armor. There is no expression on his blank metal face, but his body is fluid with rage.

“You’ve ruined my… only fax,” the robot says angrily, over the din of battle all around. “You’ve set me back a hundred years. I should kill you both in the most horrible ways. But in memory of our… history I will simply deactivate you.”

And with that, he punches again. Very hard. Bruno’s sternum is reinforced with diamond and fullerenes and assorted species of brickmail, and the heart behind it is as tough as a treader wheel. But there are valves; there are weak points. Underneath it all he’s still a creature of flesh and blood. The strike is precisely aimed, and Bruno feels something give way.

How astonishing it is! He feels himself collapse, watches the world spin around him, sees the floor come up to smack his helmet. He can actually feel his blood pressure dropping—it’s a distinct sensation, like standing up too quickly—and for a second or two he’s simply fascinated by the novelty of it all. Internal hemorrhage; the blood spilling warmly inside him.

But then the Glimmer King is looming over him, preparing to deliver some coup de grace, and Bruno feels a flicker of worry at what awaits him. He is afraid to die, at least a little, and he’s even more afraid of leaving this business, his final business, unfinished. In the end, a man owns nothing but his past.

But the robot says, “What does it mean that I crave your… forgiveness? Malice hurries me on, and yet my… heartless soul is toxic with remorse. In loosing so much creation upon the worlds, you’ve entrained… forces to which our mere passions are unequal. Shall we sit among the ruins and lament? Embrace your… fate, Father. I beg you.”

To which Bruno replies, weakly, “Son, the office thrust upon us we’d’ve handed you gladly, eons ago, if you’d shown the maturity that chair requires. We’re still waiting, I’m afraid.” His voice drops to a rasp. “Shall I tell you the secret of rule? It’s love. Simply that. They’ll forgive you anything if—”

But something’s wrong; among the shots ringing out, several have struck the Glimmer King himself, in the chest. The darts bounce right off the impervium, whining and buzzing off into the room somewhere, but the sites of their impact are dead gray circles, and the next volley punches right through. The Glimmer King’s hull is thin, lacking in countermeasures. Now it gapes, throwing off sparks. At the end of the day, he’s little more than a crazed household robot.

He looks down at himself, staggering, then looks to the figure of Radmer seated on the floor, his back against the wall, a well-aimed rifle tucked beneath his arm.

Indeed, Bruno sees, all the robots are looking at Radmer. All motion has ceased, and if a featureless metal head can convey shocked betrayal, then the room is drowning in it from every angle. There are no more Dolceti; Zuq and Bordi have dropped somewhere, amid the heaps of slain enemies.

Says the Glimmer King, “Nineteen years ago, when I was fallen fresh upon this world, when I glimpsed the cheering twilight and heard the rustle of leaves and the trilling of birds, this second life seemed precious indeed. I knew it would be you, Conrad. Someday, somehow, my dearest friend, I always knew it would be you. Alas, this body sheds no tears.”

That said, the thing collapses to the stone floor and moves no more. Nor do the other robots move; they’re frozen in place like statues, with blank surprise written across their bodies. The army of Astaroth is defeated.

Radmer drops his rifle and crawls to Bruno’s side.

“Sire! Are you hurt?”

Looking up at his old architect laureate, Bruno gasps out a chuckle. “You could say so, yes. My heart is broken at last, my chapter in history drawn finally to a close. It feels so strange, and yet I know exactly what to do. To die. The arc of my life has led me to this moment fully trained. Are you hurt?”

Radmer looks pained at those words. “I’ll live. Oh God, I’m sorry, Bruno. About your son, about everything.”

He doesn’t bother with platitudes, with assurances, with medical lies. He has, Bruno thinks, seen too many dying men.

“My son left us long ago,” Bruno says, and now his voice is just a whisper. His limbs are cold and numb; he needn’t move them ever again. “But you’re still here. Shall I claim you for my own? Don’t be sorry, lad. I’ll let you in on a secret, my own private sin: I have no regrets.”

He would fondle an air foil if any had survived the journey through the fax, but they, too, are gone. And it’s a pity, for they illustrate so much! But perhaps mere words will suffice. “To make a thing of fragile beauty and wonder, Conrad—even to try—is a worthy task for human lives. I’d do it all again, every moment of it.”

He’d like to say more about that, but there isn’t time. There isn’t need. He appears to be finished.

Chapter Twenty-Five in which power fails to corrupt

Radmer wept for hours. For Bruno, yes, and for Bascal. For the Olders and Dolceti, for Xmary and Tamra and the Queendom of Sol. And for himself, with the misfortune to be the last of them all. If ending comes to all things, he wondered, and gives them meaning, why do we despise it so?

When he was finished weeping he slept, for his body was tired and his injuries serious. He never knew how long he slept, for when he awoke, the twilight over Astaroth was unchanged. But he felt a little better—his body was healing itself—so he found a kitchen all decorated with cobwebs, and made a fire from the dusty wood he found there, and grilled up the last of his olives and fatbeans. Oh, what he wouldn’t give for a flavor designer now! He’d been eating this slop for a thousand years too long. He was ready for something new, or an end to all of it.

When his meal was done he found his way outside, and located a shovel, and dug seven graves in the rocky polar soil. Incredibly, there were some small trees here, and birds warbling from their branches, and soil-grubbing bugs and worms for the birds to eat, and tufts of grass to house the bugs. It was a whole twilight ecology, which apparently had grown here all by itself, for Conrad Mursk had never scheduled or budgeted such a thing. And it was quite beautiful, really—a fitting place to leave his friends.

So that’s what he did.

Six weeks later he found himself addressing the Furies, in a darkened chamber deep within the battered city of Timoch.

“…and that is the tale, I’m afraid. The long and short of it, for better or worse.”

Said Danella Mota, “You’ve concealed information from us, General. Important information, which might have colored our judgments and informed our actions.”

“I withheld only suspicions, Madam Regent. As you said yourself, I hardly know you.”

“Ah.” Pine Chadwir clucked. “But we had history’s greatest hero right here in our midst—King Toji himself!—and you told us nothing.”

“King Toji never existed, Madam.”

“Towaji, then.”

“Still. The creatures of fable bear little resemblance to the human beings of actual memory. His name was Bruno, and he once taught university. The rest is mere happenstance.”

Which was neither completely true nor completely fair, and would have been a perfect opening for Spiraldi Truich, the oldest of the Furies, to further demolish Radmer’s pretenses. But Spiraldi was among the casualties of the siege; she’d died on the walls with a rifle in her hands, protecting her people as a good ruler ought.

So instead, Radmer took the opportunity to change the subject. “When will new elections be held, Madams Regents? And in their wake, will it still be you who address me here in this chamber?”

“Likely not,” answered Danella Mota. She lifted a Luner globe from its rack and turned it idly in her hands. “With the southern hemisphere in such disarray, Imbria and Viense are the only real nations remaining. And we’re wounded, both. We can’t leave the south to its fate, and neither can we help them—or each other—through separate efforts. We must work together—truly together—to clean the mess and build this world anew.”

“A global government?” Radmer asks, impressed with the audacity of such a scheme, at such a time as this.

“A global monarchy,” says Pine Chadwir. “And then a Solar one, to rival the glories of old. And now we come to the deeper purpose of your summons here, General, for no living person remembers the glories of old more fully or more truthfully than you.”

Oh. Crap. Radmer doesn’t like the sound of that.

“No one has fought longer or harder than you, for the peace and justice of Lune.”

Worse!

“No one knows this world better than you, who built it.”

“Stop right there,” Radmer says. “I am out of the leader business, and I mean forever. Once we’re done with our little chat here, I’m going to hightail it under the veils of Echo Valley and never come out. I’ll rot my brain. I’ll walk a groove in the soil with the endless reptition of my steps.”

“A selfish gesture,” says Danella Mota.

“Not at all,” says Radmer. “This isn’t my world. We speak different languages, Lune and I. If I’m as wise as you suggest, then listen to me now: choose your leaders from among yourselves. The past is dead because it killed itself. Through better management than mine.”

“There is renewed interest in the Old Tongue,” says Pine Chadwir. “In the old ways. In yourself.”

“I said no.”

More words would certainly have been exchanged on the subject, had a page not chosen that moment to run in screaming, “A ship! Madams Regents, a ship has landed!”

“Inform the port master,” said Danella. “All cargoes are welcome, but we’re in session here, boy.”

“Madams, please, it’s a spaceship!”

And so it was that C. “Rad” Mursk came face-to-face with Ambassador Tilly Nichols of the Biarchy of Wolf and Lalande.

“You look just like your pictures,” she said, shaking his hand out there on the cement of the Timoch International Airport. Her gleaming starship hulked in the background like the end of a world, appearing less like something out of history than something out of its most fanciful stories—a Platonic dream of starshipitude.

“And you look… familiar,” he said, trying to place the woman’s face.

“You knew my birth mother. Bethany.”

“Ah! And how is the Queen of Lalande?”

“Retired,” said the ambassador, “and thrice reincarnated. When I left Gammon she was a little girl on a solar farm, way out on the western coast. But she remembered you a little. And my father, King Eddie; she said she was going to find him someday and marry him all over again. But she asked me to give you her best. Poor dear; it never occurred to her that you might be dead.”

“I certainly might. Everyone else seems to be.”

“Well,” said Tilly, “I’m sorry for your people’s suffering, and I want you to know, we’re here to help. We tried remote activation of your inert systems, and when that didn’t work we tried synching to the remains of your collapsiter grid. And when that didn’t work, we decided to show up in person. We’re installing a wormhole gate now, so you should be up and running in a few days. Then we can start in on educational travel and the real-time transfer of materiel. This place looks like a long, long shortage of just about everything.”

Conrad gawked. It had been a long time since anyone had spoken to him like that! “What and what? You’re… Young lady, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Did it ever occur to you to ask permission? To await an invitation for your help?”

“Fallen colonies are often too proud,” she said. “We understand, having been there several times ourselves. Only with great determination and patience have we elevated ourselves to what you see.” She nodded back at her ship, from which strangely attired workmen were already unloading crates and tubes of… something. “And it must be particularly galling, for the very seat of humanity to fall…”

“Fall where?” he demanded. “Enlightened lives are played out here all the time, as always.”

“Short lives.”

“Oh, so. Does quantity suddenly matter more than quality?” That sounded lame to him. What he really meant was something grander, but he lacked the words. He had always lacked the words.

“If there isn’t time to achieve personal fulfillment,” said Tilly, “then yes, I would say quantity matters. In the Biarchy, we strive for milestones and then reinvent ourselves upon their achievement. Before we grow stale. We join the Exploration Corps, which will soon be visiting a hundred new stars. Or the Diplomatic Corps, which visits the old ones and invites them into the wormhole network, which we call the Muswog. Five systems and counting! The point is, we have these choices, and we make them freely.”

“Hmm. Well. I believe I understand your offer; you’ve clawed your way up from the ashes of your parents’ great blunders, and it has made you strong and clever and smug. And now, in your boundless generosity, you seek to deny the same privilege to the people of Lune. The only thing wrong with this place, kiddo, is people like me who never cleaned up our toys. But that’s all finished now. Help? What do you expect to help us with? What is it you think we need?”

“That’s what I’m here to find out,” she said reasonably. “I asked to speak with someone in charge, and you’re the one they sent. Has there been… some error?”

“Definitely,” he answered, turning his back on her and everything she stood for. “Like your mother, I’m just some farmer who used to be somebody.”

Chapter Twenty-Six in which an act of kindness takes flower

Conrad would have cause to regret those words, for as a king he’d’ve been entitled to throw these smug missionaries out on their collective ear. As it was, they dealt with the Furies instead, and with the Grand Kabinet of Viense, and in short order they had conspired together to launch the largest restoration project in history.

Murdered Earth was, apparently, an affront to all humanity, for the Biarchists promised, at their own expense and under their own supervision, to place a shell around it which closely mimicked the original surface to a depth of fifty kilometers. Following this, they contemplated the resurrection of Mars, and possibly Venus as well. And resurrection was the proper word, for they planned to populate these worlds with simulacra of their departed residents—most especially the famous ones.

“It’s nothing personal,” Tilly Nichols insisted, in response to Radmer’s outrage. Was Earth to be an amusement park, then? A monument to its former self, incapable of growing beyond the fairy tales that had accreted around it like orbiting debris?

“Not at all,” Tilly said, looking and sounding politely amused. “We expect it to be as different from the original as you are from the dapper fellow my mother once courted. In your experience, eternal life and eternal death are the only options. You admit no shades of gray.”

“But some people will remain dead,” he accused. “Most, in fact. The vast majority.”

To which she simply shrugged. “Our powers are limited. And the ones who do live will be reincarnations, yes. Not literal resurrections, not faxed copies. But also not witless and alone, like the natural-born, with no past lives to draw upon, no wisdom to inform their childhoods… I don’t know what you’re so offended about, truly; in Barnard your children were born as functional adults!”

“That also offended me.”

“Oh. Well. We’ll try to be conscious of societal norms here, to avoid such offenses wherever possible.”

“How kind of you.”

Unperturbed, she said, “To answer your question, Mr. Radmer, we start with celebrities because the reincarnation process is more accurate the more we know about a person. And through the gratings and lenses of their memory we can sift the quantum traces of those we know less well. Slowly but surely, Earth will give up her secrets.”

And it was with precisely these sentiments that they exhumed the grave of Bruno de Towaji, and scanned his rotting carcass and the many electromagnetic ghosts it had left behind. De Towaji had gotten around in his long life; there were imprints of him all over the ruins of Sol system.

And of Tamra, who’d left nearly as many writings behind, and a great many more recorded images. “The lift of an arm,” said Tilly, “speaks volumes about the mind that controls it.”

Alas, through Tilly’s eyes he could see that it was true. Poor Tamra. To be a literal puppet for these oversweet invaders, lifting her arms for their amusement!

“I’d love to scan you as well,” she told Conrad on another occasion. “You knew the king and queen personally; you knew the age. Living brains make questionable witnesses when it comes to detail, but for recalling the scope and flavor of a bygone era, nothing else really quite compares.”

But Conrad had no desire to meet—much less help create!—the Biarchy’s caricatures of his dead king and queen. And as for the Xmary they would surely pluck from his dreams… God, the notion was seductive. Fragments of a woman half-remembered, whom he’d loved fiercely but never wholly known, for who could know the mind of another? Still less a woman! For all he knew, she would be as monstrous as the ghost of Bascal in a robot body. And know it! And resent it!

“Thank you, no,” he said to Tilly. “My wife would kill me.”

Finally, though, during his fiftieth or two hundredth argument with this alien woman, relations began to shift. They were in her quarters near the top of the starship, seated on opposite sides of a dining table that had risen up from the deck, overflowing with faxed meats and cheeses, steaming flavor-designer breads and lightly chilled fruits. The outer bulkhead had gone transparent, and the views of Timoch and the ocean behind it were pleasing.

They could have met anywhere; it was an act of kindness—of respect—for her to invite him specifically here. She wasn’t even playing him, particularly—just being thoughtful. And it came to him suddenly, that she was doing exactly the same thing on a global scale: simply extracting and fulfilling the most deeply held wishes of Lune. Was it her fault she was rich? Had guarded generosity become a sin? Her resources seemed to dwarf even those of the Queendom at its peak, and there was no wickedness in her, nor foolishness.

Whether Conrad liked it or not, the people of this world were indeed choosing their own destiny. They wanted an end to death and politics, and who could begrudge them that age-old impossible dream? More than that, they wanted the stars, as Conrad had once wanted them. When had he shriveled into this ridiculous old fuddy-duddy, with nothing to do but stand in their way? His time was past. How lucky they were not to have him for their king!

But even this sentiment brought only kind laughter when he shared it with Tilly.

“You love these people, Mr. Radmer. It’s evident in everything you do.”

“Call me Conrad.”

“All right, I will. Thank you.”

“You’re genuinely welcome.” But then a black thought overtook him, and slowly became a certainty. “You beamed signals at this world. You tried to activate our wellstone systems remotely. Nineteen years ago, was it? Maybe twenty?”

“We tried. It didn’t work,” she said, shrugging.

“It did,” he told her. “My God. The haunted towers of Imbria. A fax machine briefly awakening in its sandy grave. The finger of God, commanding a robot to waken. It was you!”

“I… don’t understand.”

“You stirred up old horrors, Ms. Nichols. You’re responsible for the robot army that nearly destroyed this world! Bruno had the sense to kill his monstrous child, millennia ago, but you brought it back!”

That seemed to rock her. “We what? Conrad, in all our encounters we’ve done our level best to avoid damage—”

“And a splendid job you’ve made of it!” he spat, trying to sound venomous. “Only two of four nations destroyed, a fifth of the world’s population killed…” He wanted to unload the full sedition act on her, but he found his heart wasn’t in it. His voice trailed away.

Because how could they know? How could they imagine their well-intended fumbling might kick loose such an avalanche? That there’d been a hill of loose scree waiting to collapse was no fault of theirs, and if a beggar should choke on a gift of bread, did that lessen the kindness of the gesture?

“If what you say is true,” she answered guardedly, “then reparations are in order.”

“How?” he demanded, briefly flaring once more. “You’re already giving this world everything it ever dreamed of. Its heroes, its riches, its dead… Your apology—if I dare call it that—is lost in the noise of your… overwhelming generosity…”

He stopped there, for he was spouting nonsense: they had been so good that they couldn’t do better? And that was a bad thing?

In spite of everything, the two of them looked at each other and burst out laughing. They laughed until the tears streamed down their cheeks, and then Conrad laughed some more, and wept, and felt an unfamiliar ache at the corners of his mouth. A grin that refused to be wiped away by his anger, no matter how hard he tried.

“It’s good to see you smile,” she remarked when things had settled down.

“It feels strange,” Conrad admitted, with a tinge of resentment. Then, more reflectively: “It was bound to happen sooner or later. I’m an old soldier, Ms. Nichols. An old, unwilling soldier.”

“Please, call me Tilly.”

“All right. The thing is, Tilly, it ends here. I’m finally done fighting. You may be the most genuinely happy person I’ve ever met, and my defenses aren’t up to that. I’m officially opening my gates; you may enter and do as you will.”

“Or you could come out,” she suggested. “And do as you will.”

And before he knew it they were falling into bed together, rolling and twisting on wellcloth sheets in a field of sharply reduced gravity.

“God,” he said. “Oh, my God. Is this happiness? Is this what hope feels like?”

“Explore,” she advised him, offering herself as freely as she offered her planets’ riches. “Live a little. Have some fun.”

And it seemed like very good advice indeed, here at the start of something wonderful.